Counter-Currents
Ignore the MAGA Grift & Join the Gentlemen’s Salon
Nicholas R. Jeelvy
2,016 words
MAGA was a movement of great energy and hope in 2016. It was the hope that the globalists can be defeated, that sovereignty shall return to international relations, and that the inexorable movement towards ever-closer global interconnectedness can be halted. In 2016, MAGA meant Make America Great Again. It meant concrete proposals, concrete solutions to concrete problems. It meant a wall along the US-Mexican border. It meant reconstruction of crumbling American infrastructure. It meant a revitalized American manufacturing sector. It meant realistic American foreign policy. It meant a crackdown on corruption. It was fun, sexy, and irreverent. It made fun of the stodgy, dusty Washington establishment. And in 2016, MAGA won.
By 2020, MAGA was a movement of zombie Reaganism. It was disconnected from reality and hope in equal measure. It meant vague and performative loyalty pledges to “America.” It tried to pass off an economy hopped up on cheap credit as a revitalization. It argued away the glaring lack of a wall on the border, usually by gaslighting people who wondered where it was. It meant bellyaching about “the socialists.” It bargained with the worst and most despicable aspects of the conservative establishment. It was stodgy, retrograde, and easily offended. It was the butt of jokes about negroes and Jews in MAGA hats. And in 2020, MAGA lost.
Now they claim that they won, but that the evil libturd soshulist DEMON KKK RATS stole the election — which they undoubtedly did. However, MAGA did nothing to convert its surprise 2016 victory into tangible gains, specifically in the area of preventing election fraud. For a movement that promised to crack down on corruption, it did surprisingly little of that once it secured the presidency. I remember asking at some point in 2019 why Trump made no effort to clean up the Justice Department, even a little. MAGA responded with its by then typical accusations of treason and gaslighting. The words “too short for this ride” were used.
In January of 2021, when it became apparent that Trump would be pushed out, I prepared all of my best neener-neeners, told-you-sos, and cruel jokes to unleash on all the MAGAs who called me a fed, a shill, “too short for this ride,” and other epithets. January came and went, and what I witnessed was genuine pain, despair, and suffering among the MAGA people. I was overwhelmed by sympathetic pain. I wanted to help MAGAs through this difficult time. I realized that what they were feeling at the time was all the disappointments I had with Donald Trump over a period of four years all at once. I therefore wrote “Rock Bottom Blackpills” as a hand outstretched in friendship and reconciliation to them — some took it, others ignored it.
That was nine months ago. Some MAGAs have taken the long and arduous journey to the Dissident Right. Others are trying to find other avenues of political activism, from resisting coronavirus measures and mandatory vaccinations to fighting critical race theory. Some are warming up to the idea of jettisoning Trump. Others won’t hear about it; he is their captain, for better or worse. I want to admire that kind of personal loyalty, but at the same time I’ve dated too many borderline women to forget that when someone abuses your loyalty, takes everything, and gives nothing in return, the only thing to do is walk away and warn others.
What’s left of MAGA has descended into nothing but a cynical grift. E-mails and messages have been reaching former and current Trump supporters calling them traitors, socialists, and deserters unless they donate to the GOP fundraising effort within 17 minutes. They’re dangling the hope of a Trump 2024 presidential run in front of the MAGA believers — but only if the GOP can retake the House in 2022, of course. The combinations of threats, pleading, promises, gaslighting, and lies reads like the messages and e-mails I used to get from my borderline exes after they put on one shitshow too many: I love you, I’ll kill myself, I’ll show up at your office, please don’t leave me, I hate you, I’ll let you fuck my sister, I’ll tell everyone you’re impotent, my life is meaningless without you, I’ll tell the cops you raped me, don’t go, I love you.
I’ve been told by friends in America that this is not new and that this rhetoric from the Trump people has been ongoing since 2016. Maybe MAGA was always a grift, but calling the most patriotic Americans traitors is a new low, even for the pond scum running Conservative Inc. Vox claims that Trump is also profiting from this grift, but Vox isn’t exactly trustworthy. Regardless, if this goes out under Trump’s name, it probably has his okay, which makes him complicit in the grift. This level of borderline ex-girlfriend manipulation means that MAGA is no longer a viable political entity, and merely a cash cow for a cadre of cynical grifters. The MAGA agenda has been subverted. The MAGA people have gone through a population bottleneck. Those with even a smidgen of intelligence and self-respect have either defected to the Dissident Right, disengaged or are distancing themselves from the toxic grift machine. Those that remain, the MAGApedes, are the lowest of the low — the stupid, the gullible.
Halfway through writing this article, I learned that Donald Trump has launched a new social media network known as Truth Social. In about two hours, his personal account on it was hacked and an image of a pig defecating on its own scrotum was posted to it. The site was shut down soon after. The site reportedly runs on an unmodified version of Mastodon code, a free, open-source social media software that was launched in 2016. Other attempts by Donald Trump to conquer digital space have ended in similar embarrassing failures. You’d think that with all the money he’s raised, he’d be able to hire a decent developer.
More importantly, the fact that Donald Trump and the GOP are now fundraising like mentally ill ex-girlfriends means that they are no longer confident that they can win politically, and are only looking to line their pockets with money from gullible patriots and what’s left of MAGA. This means that the national populist thrust in America is without a leader, and as such, will likely flounder, crash against the power elite, and lose ignominiously — unless, of course, Americans master the art of national populism after Trump. That’s where sites like Counter-Currents come in.
I’ve been writing for this site since December 2018. In the beginning, I wrote on impulse. Whatever popped into my mind, if it could be made into something useful for the cause, I put it down in text. Sometimes I wrote for my own pleasure and catharsis. I still do. Sometimes I wrote because nobody else could see the things I wrote about. As an outsider who nevertheless speaks the language and understands the culture, I have a fresh perspective on America. But for the longest time, I wrote without knowing what I’m doing.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
Sometime in the summer of 2021, it struck me that I’m cataloguing my own successes and failures in organizing as well as writing a manual on how to build a strong metapolitical organization. Sure, you get some forays into cultural issues, ideology, and armchair philosophy, but for the most part, I’m concerned with the psychological types who become dissidents, how to overcome their shortcomings, how to prevent retards and psychos from entering, how to keep morale high, how to develop a culture which is resistant to subversion and demoralization, how to develop heuristics for rapidly distinguishing between friend and enemy under conditions of uncertainty, and how, when, and whether to use fellow travellers without getting too invested with them — indeed, how to engage with the mainstream, if at all. One of these days, I’ll gather it all in one place and have it out there. Hopefully, it’ll be implementable and replicable.
If it sounds like I’m making it up as I go along, it’s because I am. Making it up as you go along is the standard of human innovation. Nobody comes up with perfect theory and then implements it without a hitch. Rather, practice precedes theory. Men solve practical problems of survival, the commonalities of which are compiled in instructional manuals for their apprentices so that the problem-solving ability is transferred vertically through the generations. Then other, learned men extract from the heuristics and practices for the solving of those problems the theoretical commonalities and underpinnings, thus developing the theory and (hopefully) using it to refine the practical methodology. Or, as Nassim Taleb would put it, if one aims to become a philosopher-king, it is better to start as a king than as a philosopher.
However, if this project is to be completed, I’m going to need Counter-Currents — not just as a place to publish my ideas and expose them to your criticism so that they can be improved, but also as a place where other authors can post and compare ideas and engage in dialogue. It is also an archive of older ideas. I recently wrote on creating a dissident high culture, for example. This necessarily means having a culture-creating class of people and salons where they can converse and collaborate. For the time being, Counter-Currents is one of the very few such salons and the only one explicitly oriented towards art, culture, aesthetics, and philosophy. When you donate to Counter-Currents, you’re funding the foremost metapolitical salon in the world.
When you subscribe and get behind the Counter-Currents paywall, you’re purchasing a membership in a gentlemen’s club. It gives you the privilege to read the paywalled content immediately instead of waiting for 30 days. It gives you the privilege to comment without waiting to have your comments approved. In other words, you’re no longer just a spectator; now you’re a member of the salon.
I’m not going to suggest that you are a traitor or antifa if you don’t donate now. What I see of the Conservative Inc. and MAGA style of fundraising disgusts me. No, you’ll get Counter-Currents even if you don’t pay for it. Some of you may have other obligations. We’re always harping on about the need for white people to start families and build local community, after all. That costs money, and I understand if you choose to prioritize them. I also understand that the economic situation in America and elsewhere is getting to be pretty bad. If you can’t help us, don’t feel guilty; we’ll still be here for you.
I am rather inviting you to take part in the project of white survival. Your contribution will help us survive for another week, maybe another month. Staving off DDoS attacks, keeping the lights on — these things all cost money. If you value Counter-Currents, if I’ve contributed to your life, please consider donating. At the time of writing, we’ve only reached 60% of our fundraising goal, with only two months and ten days left to go. There’s an old Macedonian folk tale about a shepherd who sheared five sheep in a day, but as the Sun set, he asked his wife to light the lamp, as he intended to shear twenty sheep within the hour. It’s supposed to have a moral about procrastination or something, but nevertheless, in practice and in business, I’ve found that men become far more productive as deadlines loom closer.
I’m not promising you imminent victory. I’m promising you a long, hard slog. I’m promising you struggle and self-denial. I’m promising you the possibility of survival, at some point in the far future. You won’t get penis pills or water filters from donating here. You might get some crotchety old man’s books for free (I hear he went to prison — there must be some riveting anecdotes about that). But you’re reading this at Counter-Currents. This tells me one thing about you: You’re a courageous person, and you’re a person of healthy instinct and good character. You understand the value of nobility and intellect, and you appreciate beauty. As such, I have no doubt you know what lies ahead and what must be done for our people to survive.
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21 comments
The Trump presidency was, and forever will be, the story of a freshman politician, a rookie, where The Swamp drained him. Moreover, he comes across as a glory hound who just wanted to check “the Presidency” off his bucket list before his Boomer ticket got punched. Trump, while engrossed in the heat of New York City real estate and beyond for decades, and it’s own unique politics, was nevertheless, never even the mayor of a small town, or versed in the basic realities of bureaucratic civil service, much less at the vast federal and imperial level. And that was painfully obvious within his first month in office; when I lost faith. As Mr. Jeelvy aptly says, Trump is much more the story of what Americans and right-wingers wanted to believe in the throes of declining global empire, than what any of them got.
When hope turned to grim pragmatics, the question quickly became, “Well, what can we still get?” And the answer was, not a whole lot. Instead of any concrete policy fulfillment, as Mr. Jeelvy suggests, we basically got a modest slowing down of the full-court press Hillary Clinton would’ve had us in, and which the Biden Administration is keen to resume.
The biggest takeaways from the Trump years are 1.) he poked a few useful holes in mainstream media hegemony 2.) he bought us some precious time by sticking his head in the dam’s leak, and perhaps most importantly in time 3.) he and his stolen re-election brought the monster of the deep state, NGO, media, and academic complex into greater view than what normies are either aware of, or used to handling. There was now no hiding from the fundamental ugliness and viciousness of our imperial existence, foreign or domestic, and for what it’s worth, we still have Trump to thank for that. Not that he is, or was, self-aware enough to appreciate much of any of this.
I won’t speak for all of the Dissident Right, but my distinct sense is that most of us just want Trump and pointless federal elections to just go away. If by some minor miracle either he or election integrity were to somehow resurrect themselves enough to offer marginal value to our goals, then perhaps we’ll cross that bridge when we get there; but both factors have been dead to us for several years now.
In the Dissident Right, we continue to do our thing, set the tone we wish to see in the future, attempt to inspire the better and best remnants of MAGA to see things our way, and keep pressing forward.
Sound insights. Although I voted for Trump 3x, I never liked or trusted the guy. Still, I was enraged at anyone who didn’t vote for him in 2020. As the unbelievably odious Biden junta has proven, I was right. Trump’s defeat dramatically emboldened the Left, as I knew it would. Compare the Democrats today (on any issue, even including race and policing) vs under Obama. They’re worse now. Any WN who didn’t vote for Trump is a fool, all of his defects and disappointments notwithstanding. Trump’s deal is not really America First, but Trump First. I don’t think he’s a bad man, or a true sellout. I don’t think he was sincere when he entered the GOP primary. He was having fun; feeding his ego; getting a few worthy sentiments and outrages off his chest; and building his brand (which is, or was, a substantial source of his actual wealth). Then when he won the primary he realized that he could actually win the Presidency, and so went all out (as he also did to get reelected).
Trump never really knew what he was doing, which is much of what initially angered me about him. He had no idea what kind of Cabinet appointments to make. I was initially very worried that his lack of self-discipline would poison our ideas. Certainly, he did so wrt many of the affluent moderate class that the GOP does need in its coalition.
I hope Trump goes away. If he wins the GOP nomination in 2024, he just might snatch defeat from what very likely will be victory. He is uniquely offputting. What we need is Trumpism (the National Populist image, not the disappointing reality) minus Trump. But if he secures the nod, I will vote for him a 4th time (but not a 5th; I will vote for someone else in the primary). I’m not an acclerationist. I’m 60, unmarried and without immediate family, and live in a very diverse area of a very blue state. I really don’t want a national collapse and dismal retirement just to have a possibility of preventing white extinction in two centuries. Whites in the past never had to behave that way. They defended and advanced their personal and familial interests, and in so doing simultaneously built up our collective racial power. We must be patient and grind out the conditions for long term victory, planting trees today that we hope will bear fruit for future generations. That means that, even though we are losing, we must do our best to surrender as slowly as possible. This will give us the time to do the work that is all that realistically might result in the liberation of our people in the future.
Trump didn’t shut down the hysterical women and Faucis of the country who made mammoth political hay out of the coof. Trump also did nothing (aside from tweeting LAW AND ORDER repeatedly) throughout the riotous 2020. He didn’t build the wall, he fired Jeff Sessions who was the first to endorse him, he let Jared make the foreign policy decisions, he let black criminals out of prison, and he didn’t bother defending his supporters on 1/6. The Left was already emboldened with Trump in office. They won all the battles, while the Mages thought they were winning bigly. Oh, he also put Kavanagh, Gorsuch, and the weeping-over-George-Floyd broad in black robes.
Trumpism can only work without the Republican party.
“The site reportedly runs on an unmodified version of Mastodon code, a free, open-source social media software that was launched in 2016.”
I can just imagine Trump’s eyes lighting up when his intern says “Well, there’s this free crap we could use instead.” Deal! Never underestimate the cheapness of the rich. They didn’t get rich by paying for things. I’m told that JFK never carried cash (in the pre-card days) and simply expected anyone drinking or dining with him to handle such distasteful matters as settling the bill, in return for the pleasure of his deigning to sit with them.
Canada’s JFK, the father of their current drama teacher Prime Minister, Justin Turdeau, was a notorious skinflint as well, never paying for meals or drinks. There is a famous photo of him pretending to strangle himself by pulling his necktie up over his head, and pulling out his tongue. That necktie was not even his, he asked a supporter for it and kept it after the photo op.
I think we all know Castro’s son is an idiot and a cheapskate.
Mr. Jeelvy, generous characterization of the MAGA crowd. I share(d) your disillusionment and timeframe, and count myself among those who wish Trump et al would just go away. The gimme letters never, ever seem to stop. Just trash them, remove those sorts of people from your life, and move on. Especially avoid any organization founded or organized or fronted by a woman, or a man who might as well be one.
Trump has thrown his own under the bus too many times for me to ever respect or trust him again. At this point he is nothing but a useful boogeyman for the establishment.
Trump is like a heavyweight boxing champion who won the world title by knockout but then has corrupt judges take away what he won in the ring so to speak. Trump is the uncrowned champion and it would be a lot easier for me and other to say goodbye to him and his ridiculous emails/texts were it not true that he was robbed. If the opposition really wanted Trump/MAGA gone they should have abided the will of the people in 2020 and watched as Trump became forever ineligible after serving out his second term. Now, the uncrowned champion is still out here and we want to see him regain the crown like George Foreman or Muhammad Ali. It’s only right. President Trump is a fighter. Let him fight.
Donald Trump has bad character, as even a cursory examination of his career will reveal. He is ignorant, disloyal and corrupt. His chief achievement as President was managing to serve a full term. He is manifestly unworthy to hold any public office. It is time to move on.
i was a voracious reader of this site in 17-19. But in 2020 I left, as it turned into Trump cheerleading. I knew Trump was a con in March 2018 when he failed on OmniBus. The mask was off yet, so many continued their faith in that false god. Hampton even wrote a crazed column that claimed the millions of missing white guys were *actually* not me and my friends, but Gary Johnson voters who decided to come home to Biden. Dreck! I’m glad this article was the first one I saw when I logged on here for the first time in a long while.
There was always a minority of us who weren’t enthusiastic about Trump. Part of the reason I love Counter-Currents is that there is no party line to toe and pluralism is allowed (and expected).
Yes.
“I’ll let you fuck my sister.” ??????? Tell me you’re kidding.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing myself. I was simultaneously tempted and disgusted. Walked away a day after, never looked back.
China owns trump too:
https://www.trunews.com/stream/trumps-social-media-start-up-has-wuhan-connection
China has successfully infiltrated the USA – they control BOTH parties.
I was an avid supporter of Trump when he was first elected in 2016–I was just eligible to vote that year, so I was very invested in the hype. I mistakenly believed that he was making decisions and seeing to reversing some of the “progressive” policies, though I was not naive enough to believe he would do anything really drastic. I have a unique perspective in relation to the rest of my culture–I am not personally invested in it–and therefore, I am not interested in the status quo–I seek true change; if there are to be problems in life, then there are also solutions, however dirty or unpleasant they may be to enact. As 2016 drew to a close I stepped out of the political landscape and ignored most of what happened up until mid-2019 when my interest was once again piqued about the latest news from the White House.
Then the first weeks of February 2020 passed, and the world was plunged into the cold, cruel waters of the Pandemic. My attention turned back towards politics; Trump was a three-legged lion and toothless to boot, and had allowed the machinery of the system to function unimpeded by law and order. With a vaccine on the way, I had hoped that the Left would reign in their wardogs, but this was soon short-lived.
By January, I knew that Trump would never activate the troops and the signs were clear that he was merely puppet–useful, unruly, vocal, but in the end, a servant of the system.
Some months passed, until about mid-summer, and then I discovered several YT channels that led me on my merry way to here: Counter-Currents. And a dearth of knowledge and wisdom of the metapolitical.
Trump served his purpose–he got us who would never consider entering politics into the sphere, I see a world broken and shattered, lying wasted and ruined, its rotting corpse being drained of life that had once sprung forth so freely from its soul. Someday, youth will flow from our veins and loins, the world will tremble yet again at our power and mastery.
Take heart, dear brothers! Do not be depressed by bad-faith actor like our Humpty-Dumpty-in-presidency. He served the purpose of the court jester–the man to make fun of the empire and mock its stupidity, its decadence, its decay. And people took notice, they looked around, and realized where the promise of liberty has led them.
Though now we are shackled, someday we will reign supreme!
MAGA/Trump 2015-2016 reminds me a lot of that Rugrats episode where Angelica asks Aunt Didi, “Aunt Didi, what’s disco?” And Aunt Didi replies, “it’s something that happened a long time ago and is never, never coming back.” I think that sort of sums up the MAGA/Trump movement from 2015-2016 in that it’s like disco. You had to have been there, it was a product of its time. There was an energy what with the dank memes, Trump’s unexpected winning of the Republican primary and even more unexpected winning the presidency. I don’t see how Trump’s going to be able to get that energy back. Then again, the Biden presidency is pretty much FUBAR.
The thing was that Trump’s presidency was somewhat disappointing. Reed Johnson above made a good point on Trump not knowing anything about civil service let alone on the federal level. As such, his administration was easily subverted. He had a two year cloud lingering over it with the Mueller investigation only for that to be a now debunked conspiracy theory and all the actors involved will get away with impunity.
The Trump grifting though is very unsettling though. Especially that scandal where an auto-pay box was auto-checked.
I think we should all write an email, and/or an old-fashioned letter, to Trump, and ask him to donate the Counter Currents. I think we’ll be around long after MAGA is dust. I was, however, very impressed with as much work that Trump did with the border wall (though with much more ‘push’, it could have been completed. But with the horrid terrain problems, and — good grief — the Covid 19 Invasion — we were lucky to get as far as we did), and the set of laws he created to cut down on immigrants, we have to thank him.
As for fundraising for him to run another campaign, I say he must get ‘more involved’ and sell off some of his hotels and other assets — I mean, he’s got $2 Billion, and any savvy person can somehow squeak by with just $1 Billion, I’m sure. So, no, no donations to Trump from me. And I will throw myself into higher gear trying to eke out a few more dollars from my nest egg retirement funds — I’ll have to get better at ‘day-trading’. IF ONLY I knew how much longer I was going to live, I could plan better. However, I do have a will in place that includes CC, and so should you all.
Thank you for this. It would be nice to have a billionaire on our side, but the billionaire Trump goes after your smaller donations for a reason. Small donations add up to influence and eventually power.
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