Counter-Currents
Let the Bastards Win: James Lawrence on White Nationalism
Spencer J. Quinn
3,799 words
James Lawrence at Affirmative Right wrote a nearly 10,000-word essay back in June entitled “What’s Wrong with White Nationalism?” In it, he gets a few things right, a few things wrong, and manages to obfuscate as much as enlighten when criticizing White Nationalism. He also offers little constructive criticism and no reasonable alternatives.
He recently doubled down on his thesis with a second essay, “An Antidote to the Jewpill, Part 1,” and spent the latter half of this equally voluminous effort picking apart Kevin MacDonald’s work. But tucked away in his critique of the Culture of Critique and so on is a promise to offer “that alternative theory” to White Nationalism and the Jewpill which apparently carries it on its narrow, bony shoulders. This got me excited. After some 17,000 words, we finally get to the crux of the matter — the answer to the hypermodern query which has been confounding White Nationalists since the misty old days of June 2021: What’s a White Nationalist to be if not a White Nationalist?
Sadly, after this little tease, Lawrence reverts back to his habit of smacking Kevin MacDonald around like a Pepe the Frog piñata — all “by way of introduction” to his fabulous new theory, which he frustratingly (and perhaps characteristically) doesn’t get to. All we get instead is a promise that in the second and final part of this series, “we will look at a religious variant of the Jewpill.”
How’s that for a cliffhanger?
So is he gonna go all E. Michael Jones on us? Or is it more of a Giles Corey Sword of Christ sort of thing? I guess we’ll have to keep hitting that refresh button on the Affirmative Right page until we find out!
Snark aside, they say brevity is the soul of wit. It’s also the soul of argument. If you want to be persuasive, it’s best to be brief, punchy, and impossible to misinterpret. And you know what the enemy of argument is? Suspense. If you’re trying to peddle a controversial opinion and you have to rely on suspense to keep people interested, that means you’re either buying time until you’ve actually worked that opinion out, or you’re deliberately withholding information that you claim your reader must know. Why would anyone do that?
Here’s a joke: A man visits a psychiatrist, saying he’s suicidal. After some time, the psychiatrist concludes that the man is suicidal because of his lifestyle choices. But when the man asks what lifestyle choices he should make, the psychiatrist says, “Ah! Come back next week, and I’ll tell you.”
That’s how I felt after reading James Lawrence’s extended take on White Nationalism. He’s basically telling me that as a White Nationalist myself, I’m making a huge mistake with my life. But after 20,000 words of convoluted argumentation, perplexing non sequiturs, obscure literary references, and K-Mac bashing, I’m no closer to knowing what to do than when I started. But the thing is, Lawrence makes enough insightful comments along the way that I get the feeling he’s on to something. I’m just not sure what it is.
So, for the sake of clarity, I will endeavor to distill Lawrence’s anti-White Nationalist perspective into a 3,800-word treatise upon which readers (and myself) can ruminate like cud. If I get any of it wrong, I’m sure Lawrence will be ready to dash off a 12,000-word dissertation explaining why. And I will leave Kevin MacDonald to defend his own honor, if he cares to.
Finally, I need to make something very clear. I welcome Lawrence’s critiques of White Nationalism and am grateful that he aired them. No movement is above criticism, and given how I found myself wincing at some of his pointed observations, it seems that Lawrence knows what he’s talking about and has quite a bit of truth on his side. Indeed, nothing hurts more than the truth.
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In “What’s Wrong With White Nationalism?”, Lawrence correctly recognizes that “Westerners live under a totalitarian permanent government, obscured by a quasi-ceremonial election system.” He sees “liberal democracy” as having rendered fraudulent the “three pillars of the democratic state religion”: voting, activism, and agitprop. So far, so good. Then, in the wake of the implosion of both Donald Trump and QAnon, he accuses the Dissident Right of continuing to believe “in the dogmas and structures of democracy” despite how democracy is so obviously rigged against them these days. He would prefer to challenge these dogmas and establish a “new brand of conservative nationalist populism,” but unfortunately, dissidents on the Right insist on blaming corrupt individuals (e.g., “cuckservative politicians”) for their own failures and for the Left’s ascendency. This allows them to remain in their pro-liberal democracy safe space while pretending to further Rightist causes. This also prevents them from doing the one thing that can actually accomplish that: the destruction of conservatism.
Of course, one could argue that White Nationalism is a “new brand of conservative nationalist populism” which intends to “destroy conservatism,” but we will leave this aside because, as the frat boy in Animal House once said, “Forget it. He’s rolling.”
A few months ago — when Trump and QAnon were being forced to show their empty hands — I half-expected most of the Dissident Right to come around to this point of view by default. Surely, after such a monumental betrayal by the con party, dissidents would not go back to holding their noses and voting for it. Surely, after ‘trust the plan’, they would not go back to monitoring the public opinion situation and fiddling with the optics on their activist Nerf guns.
But I was wrong, of course, because cope springs eternal.
Lawrence hasn’t even mentioned White Nationalism at this point, but one must assume from the essay’s title that the hapless “dissidents” he describes above are indeed White Nationalists. Presumably, if White Nationalists decide to vote, donate money to MAGA politicians, or call up their Congressmen to bitch about illegal immigration, then they are simply playing with their Nerf guns.
Lawrence then takes a brilliant turn. He splits the Right up into three groups: high-church conservatives (i.e., neocons and mainstream cuckservatives), low-church conservatives (civ-nats and the Alt Lite), and the dissidents (the Alt Right). This is an elegant construction which everyone on the Right should internalize. From this, however, we learn that Lawrence’s main beef with White Nationalism is that, after taking over the Alt Right in 2016, it “weakened the movement” through its failure to recognize the three fraudulent pillars of the democratic state religion, and through its failure to check the Left’s ascendancy, just as George Lincoln Rockwell and others had failed before them. In other words, by incompetently and unsuccessfully promoting the interests of the white race, Whites Nationalists actually harm white interests by impeding the only movement which in real life could promote white interests: the anti-conservative, anti-democratic “movement” which James Lawrence has yet to tell us about.
At least that’s how I understand it. It would have been nice if Lawrence had stated this plainly in the first paragraph and then outlined a comprehensible description of said movement, but I guess you can’t have everything.
And then things get really confusing. He broadsides White Nationalists as being either “conservative-signaling ‘amnats’” or “fascist-signaling ‘wignats’,” but doesn’t give us examples. Tell me if anyone can make sense of this:
The wignats destroyed the original Alt-Right by adopting the failed strategy of Rockwell, and are now engaged in pointless third-position electioneering. The amnats are tainted by the fraudulence of Trump and QAnon, which must spell certain death for people who think that all things rotten can be polished clean by ‘good optics’.
I thought at first that he was comparing Charlottesville actors with January 6 actors. But what wignats are engaged in “third-position electioneering”? Matt Heimbach? The National Justice Party (NJP)? Can Heimbach still be called a wignat? Can what the NJP are doing really be called “electioneering?” I doubt it. And what out-and-out White Nationalists are “tainted by the fraudulence of Trump and QAnon”? Trump booster Vox Day had some egg on his face after Trump exited the White House, but I don’t think Day calls himself a White Nationalist. Who else? I have no idea. And if anyone can parse the last sentence above for me, please do so in the comments.
Lawrence does make a solid point that there has been a lot of cringe among rank-and-file White Nationalists. He also correctly summarizes how thin-skinned and paranoid some of them can be when you slaughter their sacred cows online. But he didn’t need 20,000 words to tell us that.
After this, Lawrence gets back on track by introducing a third kind of White Nationalist — the best kind:
Then there are the ‘metapolitical’ white-nats, who devote themselves to intellectual work, and are detached enough from activism to avoid the lows of MAGA cope and the heights of Nazi lunacy. Examples include Counter-Currents, Occidental Dissent, Occidental Observer, and Amren. Many writers on these sites are doing good work, documenting the course of anti-white policy in minute detail, and persuading open-minded white people that the regime despises them and that the feeling ought to be mutual.
Bravo. But when I read this, I began to understand Lawrence’s main issue. He’s looking to criticize not so much White Nationalism, but White Nationalists. This, of course, is perfectly valid, but perhaps he should have tweaked the title of his essay to reflect this. Truth in advertising and all that:
I don’t want to dwell on the actions of individuals [oh, of course you do, darling!], but we all know the general state of the Movement. Super secret fraternal organisations charging up to $10,000 for membership. Leaders who talk about racial loyalty, but can’t keep their hands off the wives and girlfriends of their right-hand comrades. Fanatical, witch-hunting anti-Semites who turn out to be married to Jews. So much backstabbing, doxing, baseless accusation, and real pathological behaviour that no-one in the Movement seems to trust anyone else at all. What an auspicious start for a new racially-harmonious ruling elite that will never again screw over its own people once they have brought it to power.
That’s about as jaundiced a take as one could get. So much for the glass being half full, right? I could certainly paint the Left to be just as bad of a shitshow, but that never seems to bother them when waging the culture wars. Why must whites hold their leaders to such utopian standards, when anti-whites clearly never do that?
Here’s another example of this tacit, anti-white double standard:
But modern white nationalists are entirely obsessed with racism, perhaps because is [sic] one of the more democratic elements of fascist ideology (which is why it also takes pride of place in mainstream democratic ideology, albeit under the Orwellian name of ‘anti-racism’). Race is an important reality of life, but to build an entire worldview upon it — to the exclusion or minimisation of everything else — can only lead to the sort of casuistry engaged in by Marxists obsessed with reducing everything to class.
Yeah. You know, James, the Left is “obsessed with racism,” too — especially the anti-white kind — and it seems to work pretty well for them. Maybe that’s the key to their power. Maybe whites as a group get slapped around so much these days because we aren’t “obsessed with racism.” Maybe most whites are actually trying to make colorblind multiracialism work, while most non-whites on the Left are simply pushing for white dispossession through mass immigration and demographic change. Maybe, just maybe, if enough whites were to adopt a more racialist attitude, we could stand up to this bullshit and stop it once and for all. Just sayin’.
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At one point, Lawrence accuses White Nationalists of failing to come up with better ideas. But I have the feeling that he’s saying this about the online characters who accuse him of being on the Mossad payroll and not about the true idea people behind White Nationalism. Greg Johnson gives us ideas in almost every article he writes, not to mention a theoretical framework behind White Nationalism. Ditto Kevin MacDonald with regards to the Jewish Question. And then there’s the ISEE Model of White Survival, which I recently reintroduced in my article “On Red State Secession.” There are others as well, and Lawrence seems to understand this — which is another confounding aspect of his essays.
Much of Lawrence’s critique beyond this underscores his assertions that White Nationalism “cannot possibly pass its own test” of promoting white survival for two main reasons: first, it has done nothing but fail in the past (e.g., Rockwell and Adolf Hitler), and second, it has so little power these days that challenging the Left through arms can only end in disaster (“division followed by reconquest”). What’s worse, white-nats cope with this failure by vainly hoping for a better future.
But most white nationalists respond to failure by doubling down on the most democratic elements of fascist ideology. They more they fail to make any headway in the here and now, the more they retreat into the deus ex machina fantasy of a White Awakening — a spontaneous mass conversion, that will be triggered when white people lose hard enough, and will either topple the state from below or instantly ‘flip’ most white elites.
Any delusion that is proven wrong in the present can find a safe refuge in the future, and the delusion of democracy as a state ultimately controlled by its people is no exception.
I get the feeling that James Lawrence is being Eeyore for the sake of being Eeyore.
What is wrong with hoping and pushing for an ethnonationalist future for one’s people? Was that not what Theodore Herzl was doing 120 years ago, back when Israel was barely an itch in his fancy Viennese trousers? What about Nelson Mandela or Gandhi? Didn’t they also rely on a “mass conversion” of their people to bring forth historical change? Why is this approach kosher for non-whites but not for whites? And how is persuading a majority of one’s people to come to a particular viewpoint necessarily democratic, anyway? Would Lawrence prefer that “metapolitical white-nats” persuade a minority of whites to go get that ethnostate? Would that be anti-democratic enough for him?
To add to this cornucopia of failure, even the national borders of an ethnostate will fail to protect whites, since the Left runs a worldwide empire which will either invade it with arms or pervade it through progress.
I think this paragraph sums up Lawrence’s defeatism pretty well:
Leaders who can start a civil war, but cannot end it on their own terms, condemn their people to the hardships of endless fighting or brutal reconquest and suppression. No wonder it is so hard to get even sympathetic whites interested in the ‘myth of the white ethnostate’. Maybe their racial survival instincts are not so defective after all.
So let me get this straight: Voting, activism, agitprop, metapolitics, civil war, ethnostate — these will all lead to failure. So what will lead to success? It seems that Lawrence’s only recommendation is for whites to keep their heads down and let the bastards win. Lawrence claims that White Nationalism works counter to white survival, but I fail to see how his alternative is any better.
Ironically, Lawrence is at his best when answering the question, “What is missing from white nationalist maps of meaning and rules for life?” In so doing, he pinpoints the “core principle” of White Nationalism as being “all races function as extended families.” This, he seems to believe, is explained best in Frank Salter’s 2003 work On Genetic Interests, which he proceeds to pick apart, something that he is really good at. This is all well and good and, as with MacDonald, I will leave Salter to rebut Lawrence’s critique if he cares to. Lawrence’s main position, however, is that meaningful ethnic kinship really doesn’t go much further than first cousins, and White Nationalists are deluding themselves if they think that they can rally whites around the flag of race when in the past whites have acted against their own racial interests — and against each other’s — in deadly fashion.
This might be the best paragraph in his essay:
Quite clearly, state power overlaps with extended kinship, but cannot be reduced to it as per Hitler’s analogy of the ‘vessel’ and its ‘contents’. Rulers are after power, order, loyalty, etc., and extended kinship is just one more tool to be used to these ends. Like any social force, its malleability has definite limits, but it tends to be the subordinate partner in any alliance with the state. For example, during the era of nationalist wars, the state championed the nation but hardly furthered its genetic interests by herding the flower of its youth to slaughter.
Fair enough. But is he right? Perhaps. It is unsettling to think that all the ethnonationalist rah-rah coming from the Dissident Right may amount to bubkes in the long run. What if, through some fluke of evolution, white people just don’t have enough ethnocentrism in their DNA to withstand the intrusion of other races into their homelands? Perhaps they are just too xenophilic, too individualistic, too curious, too nice.
Maybe reality simply sucks and the future just ain’t going to be white.
Yeah, this is a frightening scenario. But you know what’s even more frightening? Going down without a fight. This is what Lawrence seems to be recommending, despite recognizing the evil and danger presented by the anti-white Left. The only hint of hope, however, appears in his oblique admission that while White Nationalism itself is no more than “hokey cult voodoo” (and not terrible as far as hokey cult voodoo goes), the reasons for its existence are not. At least that’s how I interpret the following sentence: “White nationalism may be a weak ideology, but this frame around it is so strong and semi-truthful that it demands a whole post to itself.”
And, naturally, the frame around White Nationalism involves the Jews — which, like the psychiatrist above, he will tell us about next week.
Thus, after summarizing, interpreting, and commenting on Lawrence’s critiques — as well as giving him the benefit of the doubt for acting in good faith — I’d like to briefly present seven reasons why his ideas may not be as complete as he thinks they are:
- He offers no alternatives for success. For him, it’s all gloom and doom. But we already knew this.
- He assumes that the Left will remain static in its ability to oppress the Right and rule everybody else. Things are constantly in flux, and who’s to say that in 20 or 50 years, this will still be the case? By banking on non-white immigration to overturn white majorities, the Left — especially the Jewish Left — is playing a dangerous game. Many of these non-whites are no friends of the Jews, and the resulting friction could weaken their anti-white coalition. Further, given how savagely fractious Third World politics can be, such a coalition could be weakened even more as different non-white groups vie for power. In such a chaotic environment, White Nationalism could thrive.
- He assumes that whites will remain static in their temperament and traits — at least in the West. Races evolve over time as they respond to environmental pressures. Who’s to say that the millions of feckless, xenophilic urban-dwellers who currently make up most of the white Left won’t ultimately dwindle into irrelevance, leaving the majority of the race to the more fecund, militaristic, traditionalist types — the very types who would be more receptive to White Nationalism if the circumstances called for it?
- What he claims will fail miserably for whites actually works astoundingly well for Jews and other non-whites. Obsessing over race is what took both of these groups to the dance, but it is what takes whites out of it. Go figure.
- He cherry-picks the worst cases and ignores promising data. When I started at Counter-Currents in March 2016, it was rare for even a popular article to receive 10,000 hits. This is now commonplace, despite the deplatforming and DDOS attacks this site has had to endure. For example, as recently as April 2019, my article “Golems, Golems, Everywhere” was the second-most viewed Counter-Currents article that month and garnered 5,812 hits. 15 months later, in July 2020, my article “Wallet Lives Matter” was the eighteenth-most popular that month and took in 13,425 hits. This momentum has continued, with my April 2021 article “Biden to Whites: Drop Dead!” coming in eleventh for the month with 18,955 hits. It would have been nice had Lawrence actually spoken with real White Nationalists, advocates, and identitarians to collect this kind of data himself. Instead, however, he just assumed that most of us are cringey shitposters propagating outmoded and unworkable ideas. Furthermore, how can his negative image of white-nats explain the consolidation of the Dissident Right which has been going on this past year? People who are not White Nationalists, identitarians, or advocates are now associating with people who are. Jim Goad coming to Counter-Currents is a great example. So is Colin Flaherty associating with Jared Taylor. And how can Lawrence explain a Jewish dissident like David Cole, or a mainstream Asian-American columnist like Michelle Malkin speaking at the 2021 American Renaissance conference? All of these changes can be seen as a coup for the Dissident Right. Maybe we’re not so bad after all?
- He downplays the possibility that the online trolls who accuse him of being a Mossad lackey are in fact feds. Recently, the FBI engineered a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in which there were more informants than there were perps. So Lawrence should probably toss this really big grain of salt into whatever mess he finds himself in online.
- His suggestion that the best plan for white racial survival is for whites to keep their heads down and not antagonize the Leftist beast ignores the atrocities of the early Soviet period. How well did passive resistance work out for Soviet dissidents? Not well, to the tune of 20 million people dying in gulags or terror famines prior to the Second World War alone. Can we really trust our current Leftist overlords not to do something similar in the future?
Despite our disagreements, I give James Lawrence a lot of credit for writing these two essays, and I look forward to his third. I hope he’ll see past all the teasing and snark and realize that I take him very seriously. He makes quite a few valid points, and ultimately may be correct. I don’t think he is, but even if he is, I would still choose White Nationalism over anything else. Why? Because it assumes the most serious fighting stance against the Left. And if there is one thing we can count on, it’s that the Left will some day soon bring the fight to us.
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24 comments
If it wasn’t for your rebuttal Mr.Quinn, I wouldn’t be aware of Mr.Lawrence’s essays – and will go back to the link and make sure to read it. But what I gather from your article, about the essays, I tend to agree with Mr. Lawrence’s assessment. Unlike the non-whites, the whites in the U.S. never looked at themselves through the prism of the race – and they often worked against their interests for the benefit of the others. The “White Nationalism” was always on the fringes – until the Democrats (the Liberal Establishment did that many decades ago) openly abandoned the white working-class who flocked to Trump’s populism in the hope he would protect them, the real victims of the trade policies, crime, and opioid epidemic. The media and the establishment went on the attack manufacturing crises after the crisis even the “metoo” movement was born in the order to dethrone Trump. I happened to follow the right-wing in the U.S.from the far-off ex-Yugoslavia while serving in the military I read several part articles in one of our monthly magazines,(Duga, Nick Jeelvy should be familiar with it.) on the “Silent Brotherhood” and Robert Matthews. The ’70s and the ’80s were far more active years for the Right Wing extremism that is today. The interest remained even after I moved to the U.S. in the mid-’80s, and realized how unknown these movements were to the average Americans because they were insignificant. The KKK rallies, which were much larger than today, were only a footnote buried somewhere in the news. Shouting matches between protesters and counter-protestors were the “most dramatic” encounters reported. With the occasional stone thrown. The “White nationalist” sentiments never gained much traction even after the violent Race L.A.riots, at least for any duration. Patrick Buchanan’s presidency run, even after his populist speech at the GOP convention was unsuccessful, (closer to failure.) So what gives? Are Americans inherently averted to ethnocentrism? I’d say yes. In general. My suggestion, to preserve a modicum of the traditional values, to combat Globalist neoLiberal ideology is to build a populist conservative coalition with non-whites: Something like the Brasilian Integralist movement of Plinio Asado. The U.S. is a bi-racial multi-ethnic country – unlike ex-Yugoslavia where ethnic lines were clearly defined (more or less in Bosnia). I believe that would be a more successful long term approach for the reality “on the ground”
Best Wishes
Hi Dixie Serb!
You are a traitor to the white race. How much is the Mossad paying you to spew this anti-white filth?
(Just kidding)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You may very well be correct, and I admit I struggle with some of the issues you bring up. But I do look to examples of white ethnocentrism of the past for inspiration. I also doubt that any “populist conservative coalition with non-whites” will ever work. If whites won’t even take their own side in a fight, what makes you think non-whites will join us?
Lol, that was a pretty good intro. For a second I thought…
Anyway, I appreciate you answering my semi-literate post (I re-read it. Christ!). Not to embarrass myself any further I will only add this: I only hope the further unrelenting demonizing of the whites, will bring more of the people who are on the sidelines, to our side.
I appreciate what all you guys do. It’s a valiant effort.
Regards!
You don’t think the US is showing some violently clear ethnic demarcations lately? Certainly looks like that from this side of the pond, and I expect worse to follow in both Britain and America (as we used to call them).
Not really violent, unless as a whitey you are at the wrong place and at the wrong time, like a gas station in the shady part of “anycity USA.” But the divide is Ideological than racial, and it’s Rural v Urban. Although you can say racial too, since demographic differences are obvious. But in my opinion, it’s still a secondary factor.
Lawrence’s analysis is simply wrong because it never rises above the obvious and is stuck in a Left/Right/Conservative/Fascist/National Socialist paradigm that has less and less to do with where White Identity Nationalist sentiment is coming from and where the emergent phenomena of White Identity Nationalism is going to.
Here’s a different take entirely: ‘The Right’ and ‘conservatism’ are parasitic political persuasions entirely dependent upon White people. There is no significant constituency of any kind for the ridiculous crap that makes up the ‘ideas’ of The Right, conservatism or White Nationalism 1.0.
Lawrence’s critique of ‘democracy’ (which Quinn seems to accept) is based upon the failure of ‘democracy’ in a multi-racial society riven with class struggle. Calhoun tells us how to fix this, how to take away power from the 50%+1 winner-take-all failings of ‘democracy’, so why not focus on the solution, rather than pseudo-problem that the Right has had with ‘democracy’ sine the Paris Commune and has lost every battle to stop ‘democracy’.
Here’s a different view: Whites invented democracy and they are really the only ones who can make it work. Also, most White Americans are not opposed to democracy and, in fact, really like the idea. So, White Identity Nationalist should be 100% for mon-ethnic, mono-racial White democracy rather then aping the Right in their disdain for it.
The Right and conservatism have no choice but to cling to the sinking ship that is represented the archaic ideas, dead ends and lost causes that are the primary legacy of the Right.
But White Identity Nationalism has choices because our politics does not derive from the Left or the Right, but from what White people want. We’re populists. We owe no one but White people any respect at all.
Critiques of White Identity Nationalism from the Right are like the cries of an abusive spouse as their sexier spouse leaves them for the last time.
Hi HT,
I’m with you. Further, I don’t accept Lawrence’s critique of democracy in general because I am not sure I understand it. But I do accept his critique of the current-day incarnation of democracy as a “quasi-ceremonial election system.” The stolen 2020 election should have made that clear to anyone with a functioning brain.
That’s a minor issue theoretically (though all-important pragmatically and thus strategically). There are very good critiques of democracy, going all the way back to the ancients (as Dr. Johnson could school us about, and has in various places here over the last decade). No serious thinker of the West pre-Rousseau, whether Christian or pagan, ever thought democracy was other than a bad form of government. Multiracial democracy is especially fraudulent: who is the demos? The old conservatives were correct: the focus should be on good government, not democratic government.
Of course, HT is correct that a whites-only democracy, especially in somewhat inherently small-d democratic America, would work vastly preferably to what we now have. But what we should really be trying for, imo ideally, but necessarily in our situation, given the Left’s and their allied nonwhite constituencies’ near-total control of both government at all levels, and nearly all opinion-molding institutions, is to limit government as much as possible. Our strategy in that regard should be to focus, both rhetorically and politically, on restoring the Constitution. Not only was the Constitution written by and reflective of white men (especially the Anglo-Nordics themselves, obviously,) WNs and WN power, such as it is, are overwhelmingly private and private sector phenomena. This has been true at least since the New Deal. We don’t control the government, either the elected version or the Deep State / Occupationist Regime, nor any of the institutions parasitically or oligopolistically benefitting from it. We’re still all just random oppressed individuals. Therefore, limited government -and the Constitution which remains the most effective means of achieving it – is our friend, and what we should back. And, too bad for HT, but that position overlaps with much of what mainstream conservatives want, too.
I don’t think HT accurately understands who are potential converts really are. (Hint: they’re not on the Left, at least not many of them.)
Absolutely. This is a struggle to persevere our people and civilisation: white majority western civilisation in our traditional nations, a cause that lies above the party political puppet theatre. Our enemies are simply those who disclose themselves by their opposition, through their actions and their words, whether they be individuals or corporations, political groups or ethnic groups, universal religions or ethno-religions. It makes no difference and there is no shortage of opponents: let them and their machinations be brought into the open!
James Lawrence seems to promote “defeatism”, while not stated, it is heavily implied from his summarized opinions. Defeatism is the enemy of progress, (or of White Identity Nationalism) and should be thrown out the window as quickly as possible. We must take full control of our internal narrative and strive to encourage one another in the path we have taken–not to heckle and jeer at each other, but to give each other a firm handshake and some well-chosen words.
Our ranks must be of High Quality–never of High Quantity. This is where QAnon failed, and seems to be what Lawrence assumes the DR to be; half-witted normies and fed informers with penchants for obnoxious antics. We must be Warrior Poets, men with chests, the Man of Tomorrow!
I rather much appreciate the role C-C has in my life; giving me hope in the ways of the White Man, though dispossessed and a stranger in his own home today, someday, somewhere, somehow we will have a nation unto our own. I dream of it often, a place for my future family, my children, my grandchildren and all who come after. We must not give up–to give up is to die.
And Lawrence is focused too much on individuals as opposed to the aims and goals of our movement, he thinks in terms of how a normie thinks–individuals as gods. And vehement and nasty gods at that. WIN is a way of life, not a political platform to elect a candidate or politician; it is so much MORE.
As always, thank you for the content and articles–I always enjoy something to stretch my mind muscle.
Hear hear! Even if he is “right”, the defeatist should, nay MUST be defenestrated AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. throw grima wormtongue out the window! No movement ever succeeded with such cowards, naysayers and shills at the helm.
I kept seeing the word “democracy” come up in this piece. The term democracy, in my opinion, is so ambiguous. People refer to the U.S. as a “democracy.” Yeah, kinda sort of. Why, because we get to vote for people for certain offices? I mean, people in Cuba get to vote too but most people wouldn’t regard Cuba as being a “democracy.” With that being said, I don’t know who Lawrence is or most others mentioned in this piece for that matter. Gonna go out on a limb though and say that I don’t think this guy has a hand on the pulse so to speak. Seemed like a lot of over-analyzing a lot of different things. Injecting all kinds of different variables in the equation, using a bunch of words that actually mean nothing and make him seem super intelligent. Most things in life are simple and explanations for events and things that happen tend to be simple. As we see in nature, water always takes the easiest, least resistant path downward.
“So let me get this straight: Voting, activism, agitprop, metapolitics, civil war, ethnostate — these will all lead to failure. So what will lead to success? It seems that Lawrence’s only recommendation is for whites to keep their heads down and let the bastards win. Lawrence claims that White Nationalism works counter to white survival, but I fail to see how his alternative is any better.”
– I couldn’t agree more, doing nothing is no alternative at all and honestly, unfathomable. We may not win in the end, but nobody could ever say we didn’t try. And in my opinion, white nationalism will be the key factor in white survival. Absolutely absurd to disagree with that or see it any other way.
I have to wonder if Lawrence is really being sincere. I’m not familiar with his work, but that summary seems rather like demoralization propaganda.
I used to like his writing, but now he just comes off as a self-indulgent despressive who is trying to spread his misery to others.
I agree with Greg Johnson.
Thanks for this. I will write a response in the next few days (before the second part of the “Jewpill” post, which as you’ve guessed is just more bashing of pinatas, I’m afraid), in which I’ll try to answer the question of “what is to be done”.
I want to clarify some things here. First, when I promised an “alternative theory” in the first part of the Jewpill post, I meant an alternative theory of Jewish power and involvement in progressivism. I then did my best to keep that promise, by explaining how the Jews were the allies of pre-existing state power (notably during the Progressive and New Deal eras) which raised them up, and did not simply take over from below in an open system as MacDonald’s analysis in CofC suggests. I also noted that this theory is, in a sense, the one that MacDonald would have written (based on his past work in PTSDA) had he been as sceptical of the democratic religion as he was of the Jewish one.
This is important, because MacDonald’s analysis implicitly contains the standard White Nationalist strategy. If the Jews took power the way he says they did, then what dissident goys need to do is to “copy the Jews”: become aggressively particularist and self-interested, preferably to the point of turning our race into our religion (as he says the Jews did millennia ago in PTSDA), and take advantage of democratic structures in the same way that they did. If, as I say, the Jews and other leftist minorities are “mamluks” – and, against a government as hostile to them as the present one is to us, would have no more powers of resistance than they had against Hitler in the ’30s or Stalin in the ’50s – then this is essentially a modern-day cargo cult.
What I am getting at, perhaps over-subtly, is that we need to instead turn the tables on the progressives, and come up with a better supra-racial (not necessarily anti-racial) universal state religion than liberal democracy. And if this sounds like a tall order, which it is, then there’s a second-best option (that also prepares the ground for it): spread apathy, distrust, ridicule and unbelief towards the existing state religion. This is how revolutionary fervour has died in darkness for the Chinese and Russians, and it might be depressing and miserable for activists but normal people are quite happy with it. The worst possible approach is to keep ginning up public belief in this rigged game without having any way to beat it.
That passage about wignats and amnats was just to the effect that the whole “Alt-Right” (using the word in its pre-Heilgate sense) has egg all over its face after being co-opted back into democracy over the last five years. The hardcore WNs drove into the wall in 2016, thinking the White Awakening had come and it was time to break out Rockwell’s playbook, then the rest of the movement proceeded to descend into Trumpist cope and QAnon madness. And most of those who never trusted Trump in the first place are just the hardest of the hardcore, paranoids walking the night in which all cows are not only black but also being milked by Mossad. It is time to admit that the dominant dissident ideology does not give a true picture of reality, and make use of the present lull to cut out self-defeating beliefs that will otherwise hamper dissidents in times of more opportunity.
This is all the more important because, as you say, there are positive developments. People in the West are becoming disillusioned, and I would prefer that they stay disillusioned, instead of being reconciled to the system by a con party souped up with watered-down WN talking points. Sorry to blackpill as usual – and I may be wrong here, as I am going on impressions, not hard data – but I would suggest that a lot of that increased traffic and engagement may be coming from Boomers radicalised by Trump and QAnon. Not to bash the Boomers, but they don’t have time on their side and the regime can afford to wait them out. What was special about the original Alt-Right was that it had such a hold on the minds of the young – and that has been slipping ever since most of us lost the irreverence and dissidence that comes from non-engagement with democracy, and went back to the old WN mixture of simp courtship and incel rage outside the boudoir window of the con party.
Finally, you are right in saying that I have picked up a bad habit of conflating the worst of WN with the best, and mixing critiques of serious thinkers with rhetorical shots fit for comment-thread cranks. It comes from hanging around at the fringes, where the loons and paranoids loom a bit larger, but the reason they are there is because no-one in the centre takes them seriously anymore. And as you say, and I have come to think as well, many of them are themselves suspect. In principle, at least, I believe in avoiding drama and fighting ideas rather than people, so I will make more effort to bear that in mind in the future.
Thanks for this, James. That does clarify things.
It seems to me that you conflate the ideas of KMac and Salter with the WN movement as it exists IRL. While there is overlap, they are not one in the same. Thus, when you criticize the former you are not necessarily hitting at the latter. It seems your analysis would be better organized under the following, not necessarily related, headings:
1. Problems with Kevin Kevin Macdonald’s evolutionary psychological analysis of the Jewish Question.
2. Problems with Frank Salter’s analysis of ethnicity and genetic interests.
3. Problems with the behavior of white dissidents.
4. A new theory of Jewish power and why a supra-racial alternative to the universal state religion of liberal democracy best serves white interests.
Anyway that’s my $0.02. I look forward to your response and Jewpill part 2.
The principal false premise of Lawrence’s argument is his insistence that power is never conquered from below or from outside. That’s not true historically, nor is it defensible philosophically. The basic principle of democratic legitimacy is that no government is legitimate if it goes against the common good of the people. That principle is defensible philosophically, but we don’t even have to offer such a defense, because it is so universally accepted that every parasitic elite claims that it really is acting for the good of the people. All populists need to is hold elites to their own professed standards, standards that happen to be both morally defensible and universally acknowledged, outside of NRx nerddom.
James,
I’d like to directly respond to some of the points made here, some of which you will no doubt agree with:
“If the Jews took power the way he says they did, then what dissident goys need to do is to “copy the Jews”…become aggressively particularist and self-interested, preferably to the point of turning our race into our religion”
I’m not sure how familiar you are with this particular sect of the WN Movement, but what you said right here is basically Appolynianism in a nutshell (Mark Brahmin’s cult). It disgusts me how much some individual “Pro-White” activists wish to, in the words of Frazier Glenn Miller, “Out Jew the Jews.” Not only is that impossible – we aren’t them, they aren’t us – but its also undesirable. Jews are the most neurotic, self-obsessive, miserable race on the planet. I wouldn’t want the White Race to become like that just to rule the world or shape it in our image.
At the risk of sounding like a David French style defeatist conservative, its better to lose and maintain our dignity than become like the Jews and sacrifice everything that makes us who we are. You are fundamentally correct that we cannot, or should we, copy the Jews. We should work to shape the world in our image, but it must be done our way and on our terms. If our way and our terms “Don’t Work” or aren’t good enough, then sobeit.
In any case, Appolynianism is the most prominent modern day example of the kind of cargo cult you’re referring to. William Pierce and Ben Klassen tried pulling similar strategies by inventing new religions. Its all so fake and ghey.
“The hardcore WNs drove into the wall in 2016, thinking the White Awakening had come and it was time to break out Rockwell’s playbook”
I suppose some WN’s might have thought that, but I think what was really going on was this: By the summer of 2015, when the term “Cuckservative” went viral, TRS and Daily Stormer took off, and all of this great content was being produced in Youtube – Murdock Murdock, the Disney parodies by Walt Bismarck, and the pop culture songs by Shiksa Goddess all come to mind – the Movement had reached a snow ball point. In other words, we were about to go mainstream and become a true counter culture. That’s not the same thing as the Normies “waking up” (Normies weren’t involved in any of that snow balling).
What was happening, which was significant, is that the Movement had reached a critical mass in terms of attracting an exponential amount of young people and new recruits. There are emails and documents showing that Peter Thiel was interested in financing certain organizations (naturally, Dickie Spence couldn’t keep his ego in check and screwed that up). We were going somewhere in 2015 and 2016, and that alone is why the Movement was deplatformed. It was in the system’s interest to stop that snow balling in its tracks, for obvious reasons. In a world where we were never deplatformed, its entirely possible that by now we would have replaced Conservatism Inc. as the dominant source of information for literally all Right Wingers under 35, our miniscule financing relative to theirs be damned.
“I would prefer that they stay disillusioned, instead of being reconciled to the system by a con party souped up with watered-down WN talking points.”
I think we should wait and see what happens to Right Wing voters when a politician like Glenn Youngkin inevitably rules like another Paul Ryan. In the past, yes, Boomer voters were content to elect Newt Gingrich types and go back to their lives. But its 2021. Things have changed on the ground. I’ve got a feeling that Right Wing voters will be much more likely to hold GOP politicians like Youngkin to the fire and not just go back to being complacent, which is a step towards the Normies “waking up.” Its not gonna happen all at once. Its gonna be a gradual process.
“What was special about the original Alt-Right was that it had such a hold on the minds of the young – and that has been slipping ever since most of us lost the irreverence and dissidence that comes from non-engagement with democracy”
This is the biggest disagreement I have with you. If you’re referring to the irreverence and dissidence of 2015 and 2016, when the snow ball almost got rolling, then yes, the Alt Right did indeed have a hold on the minds of the young. But if you’re referring to the Alt Right as it existed from 2010-2014, when Colin and Richard were running the old website, then to be brutally honest, that version of the Alt Right was nothing more than a glorified book club with little room for growth and no threat to the system.
I suppose you could argue that the seeds of that old Alt Right were what led to the snow ball of 2015 and 2016, but then we have a very different interpretation of why the Movement was snowballing. Simply put, it wasn’t snowballing because suddenly young people discovered old Alain De Benoist texts from the 1970s. It snowballed because White Nationalism as an ideology fused with the culture and tactics of 4Chan to create the most lethal online brew the internet has possibly ever seen. White Nationalism had a following in its own right, as did 4chan (specifically the pol board). Combine the two, and it was like putting together the ingredients of a bomb. If I was the system, I’d have deplatformed us too. We were too dangerous to be allowed to spread on the internet unchecked.
tl’dr In order to proceed forward in the proper direction, we must correctly understand what happened in the past. I disagree with your interpretation of what happened in the Movement in the last 5-7 years, although I do agree that we need a course correction on certain assumptions and strategies.
This is quite unfair to the people who say that whites need to take a page from the Jewish playbook. It is on par with the claim “Jared Taylor [allegedly] said he wanted to be the William F. Buckley of race realism. But Buckley was a sellout, and that’s what Taylor means.” I’m quite sure that’s not what Taylor means, and the people who say so come off as extremely jaundiced or simply paranoid. Perhaps one should ASK what someone like Taylor means by that. The likely answer is that Buckley was an urbane and eloquent advocate of conservatism when it was deeply unfashionable. Race realism needs someone similar.
Likewise, saying “Some white nationalists want to imitate Jews. That means they think we should be a religious cult of neurotic, greedy, and treacherous people” is just a jaundiced parody. I am pretty sure if you asked such people what exactly about Jews we should imitate, such people would say: Jewish ethnocentrism, solidarity, networking, hard work, and pursuit of worldly success, such as education, status, and money. Do you seriously deny that having more of these traits would improve our race’s prospects?
Here’s my angle with that critique, which is why I highlighted Appolyianism specifically: I don’t believe Whites should dominate the world. Here’s how I see the logic of “Whites should be like Jews,” regardless of who is evoking it:
Jews dominate the world, a fact which is dismissed as an “anti-semitic canard” by Jewish groups like the ADL, and indeed, by all respected intellectuals and think tanks. The only two groups of people who think Jews dominate the world are White Nationalists and devout Muslims, but its a fact nonetheless that Jews dominate the world through their control of the media and financial institutions (among other things, as you are well aware).
In a classic move of “the Jew cries out as he strikes you,” Jews have made a decades long habit of falsely accusing Whites of dominating the world (“White Supremacy” and “White Privilege”), and simultaneously accusing White Nationalists of wanting to dominate the world. Every Hollywood Nazi stereotype begins with “Whites are vicious people with cruel intentions who want to subordinate other races for their own sadistic pleasure.”
In light of these two facts, the only way I see Whites getting in a position to change our fate and shape the world in a way that makes it safe for us is if we are hyper aware of not acting in a way that makes it look like we actually want to dominate the world.
The Hollywood Nazi stereotype is a blood libel of the highest order. Every single time Whites “oppressed” or “subjugated” other races, we did it out of either self-defense or, in a worst case scenario, self-interest. The Segregation system that existed from 1896-1963 and the wars with the Indian tribes can all be justified as Whites defending ourselves from the vicious barbarity of Blacks and Natives and forcing them to behave in a way which we find safe and acceptable. Slavery, although impossible to justify as any sort of moral good, was never a system run by Simon Legree type brutes (another blood libel that the vile witch Harriet Beacher Stowe invented). And the list goes on.
I do not believe that most White Nationalists secretly want to dominate the world or subordinate other races, and insofar as they unironically do, I want them ejected into space. Normies have every right to turn on us, dismiss us, and indeed, reduce us to second class citizens if we actually want to do what Hitler and the Nazis are accused of conspiring to do (“first they invaded Poland! Then they declared war on all of Europe!! They would have invaded America next!!! And they gassed 6 gorillion of God’s Chosen People!!!!”). White Nationalism is not White Supremacy, nor should it ever be.
So then, while I understand that there are specific, benign ways that we can emulate the Jews, frankly, this misses the broader picture, which is that the quickest way to cripple and ruin this Movement is for White Nationalists to be like, “yeah, we want to replace the Jews and be the ones who dominate the world. What of it?” Mark Brahmin unironically preaches that garbage, and unlike cranks such as Cesar Tort who have preached the same thing for years but come across as lunatics, Brahmin has a soft intellectual veneer which gives him plausible deniability. Unironic White Supremacists like him – and, apparently, Spencer – are basically what our enemies accuse you and Jared Taylor of being. Its what they accuse Colin Liddell and Andrew Anglin of being.
I for one am in the camp that says, “we just want to be left alone,” which unfortunately is dismissed as a position of weakness among the “Aryan Globalist” types. Its not even a weak position at all. “We want to be left alone” plus “so please respect us!” is a weak position. “We want to be left alone” plus “and we’ll physically remove you from our country and force you to behave in a way we deem safe and acceptable” is a position of strength that also has potential mass appeal to Normies. I’ve heard Normies say things like “if they don’t want to stand for the flag, they can go back to Africa!” Its not brute force that Normies fear. Its cruelly subordinating other races the way Jews accuse Nazis and Southerners of doing.
tl;dr Focusing on ways that we can emulate the Jews misses the point that to be like the Jews is to want to dominate the world and cruelly oppress other races. We must never become that, or give the appearance that we want to become that.
To answer your question:
“Jewish ethnocentrism, solidarity, networking, hard work, and pursuit of worldly success, such as education, status, and money. Do you seriously deny that having more of these traits would improve our race’s prospects?”
With the exception of education, I would say all those things are worth pursuing and would make our race better. College Educated Whites are the foot soldiers of Cultural Progressivism and anti-white policies, so I question whether higher education is good for our race when it produces Whites who act to destroy their race. I think we should return to a system where the colleges are highly selective, and where only a handful of colleges exist in the first place. A highschool education is good enough to make the majority of White people able and competent. Higher education clearly corrupts more than enlightens, even after we account for the “liberal indoctrination” factor, which in my view is a convenient way to dismiss the reality that higher education has an inherently progressive, anti-white bias.
Thanks for this post, and calling attention to the Lawrence piece. I was unfamiliar with the guy. I must say that, in just skimming his linked essay, he writes clearly and seems intelligent. I shall have to read his whole essay, and then reassess Quinn’s response. I’m not sure Lawrence doesn’t build up several straw men; it seemed that way from my skim. Quinn’s 7 point commonsense rebuttal is excellent. Overall, the issues are not as complex as people seem to be making them out to be, with one huge exception, imo: the need for a complete reevaluation of Christian moral theology to take into account the findings of racial science and social science, and more broadly, modern biology; followed by the need to reconceptualize what constitutes “self-defense”, as well as when coercion and, ultimately, initiated warfare are morally justified.
Lawrence’s understanding of white nationalism is either interpretively wrong, or too narrowly based on unpersuasive versions of it. White nationalism is a response to contemporary tends leading ineluctably to two outcomes (ie, outcomes which are guaranteed to come about absent either an unforeseeable and improbable {but not impossible} change in modal, predictable human behavior, or political and/or military assertions of white racial will to derail or halt these trends). “If we do nothing” (to quote Jared Taylor), whites as a class will, first, experience ever more dispossession, collective societal demotion, and intensifying persecution; and, second, eventually go extinct as a race (which will include the ultimate erasure of Western Civilization). WNs are those whites who wish to avoid these outcomes (why we do is not immediately obvious, but speaks to some of the deepest aspects of psychology in their relation to personal identity), and who recognize that we will only do so via collective white racial organizing, which in turn requires the overthrow of our existing moral (and to some extent ontological) “false consciousness”.
{I will try to say something more on this topic this weekend after having read Lawrence’s original essays, which seem to be as Quinn has suggested: stimulative of deeper WN reflection on our cause’s justifications and strategies for success.}
I have some of Lawrence’s former pieces, before defeatist depression really got a hold of him (he is a quite smart person), and he seems to me a Denethor-like figure – like Denethor in the ROTK is demoralized when he sees the full might of Mordor on display, Lawrence has been demoralized when he has observed the full might of Babelism, or one world-globalist ideology of system:
LOTR The Return of the King – Denethor gives in to despair – YouTube
“WNs have betrayed me… Flee, flee your for lives!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSE4LcgQiwQ
And since he apparently lacks faith in living God, Lawrence cannot find inner strength to struggle against overwhelming odds. Thus he crumbles mentally, and being a smart person, rationalizes his panic or shell-shock.
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