Ignore the MAGA Grift & Join the Gentlemen’s Salon

[1]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 [2] 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 [2]” 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 [3]. 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.

[4]

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.

[5]

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 [6], 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.

[7]

Halfway through writing this article, I learned that Donald Trump has launched a new social media network [8] 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.

[9]

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 [10]. 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.

[11]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here. [12]

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 [13] (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.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[14]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.