The Art of Saying No

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As regular readers might know, I am a little finicky when it comes to consumer goods, ranging from food ^[2] to clothes ^[3]. Owing to my tactile hypersensitivity, I have problems when it comes to wearing certain types of material, most of them synthetic or unnaturally smooth, or perhaps even too rough. Since synthetic materials are legion in the modern world, even in self-proclaimed high-end fashion, I find myself more often than not raiding vintage clothes stores, searching for garments of bygone eras which do not irritate my delicate skin.

As Mrs. Jeelvy is always pointing out, I’m a princess trying to sleep on a pea in the polyester world — not that she is much better. But this poses a problem: If we cannot find a vintage or artisanal option, we often cannot find new clothes, certainly not within our budget range.

She asked me once, while we were walking through the park and observing all the people wearing garbage, “Can’t people see that they’re wearing garbage? Why would they even go out of the house wearing sweatpants and a puffy windbreaker vest? Can’t they sense how badly they smell after wearing a polyester shirt (which they then try to cover up with deodorant and low-end perfumes)?”

It’s tempting to think that the normal person on the street can’t feel the scraping effect of polyester against skin or cannot smell himself stinking up in a polyester shirt, nor is he offended by the very notion of leaving the house in sweatpants; it certainly makes me feel better than those stinking, tasteless rubes. Furthermore, there seems to be some evidence that higher IQ people are more sensitive to stimuli in general, and therefore require less of it to attain sense-satiety but also require less to experience sensory overload. Concordantly, lower IQ people would need more of a certain stimulus in order to even feel it — hence the tendency of low IQ people to upend entire perfume bottles on themselves and then inflict such osmotic terrorism on their fellow man. For this and other reasons, we can indeed judge people by the clothes they choose for themselves and the signal their clothes send out into the world — and clothes always send a signal.

It is pleasant to disdain ^[4] the stupid, uninspired, and uninitiated, but it is also dangerous; it is, after all, the sin we call pride. For this reason, I resisted the urge to call everyone around us stupid and thought a bit more deeply about it. Then I thought back to the way in which I buy new clothes: I wait until I find something that I feel I simply must have, and then obtain it. It is a very high standard and not one easily met. I easily go years without buying new clothes, and many of my best items I have owned for more than ten, sometimes 15 years. Some of the pieces I own are older, in some cases much older than myself, and not only because I found them at vintage stores but because I raided my father’s or father-in-law’s armoires.

A bit of advice for the young ones: Marry a girl whose dad is roughly the same size and general intelligence as you and you’ll have your pick of high-quality vintage clothes, and furthermore, you’ll increase the chance that your sons will be of the same size, thus enabling you to bequeath those same fine clothes to your children.

By refusing to purchase anything that doesn’t meet my high standards in clothing, it means that my options are limited — so limited, in fact, that I may find myself short in a particular category of clothes. Furthermore, since I insist on natural materials, I can no longer afford to just toss every dirty item of clothing into the washer. Many of them have to be hand-washed, can only be air-dried, and require care when ironed. All of these things I do myself, as I cannot quite afford to have them washed by professionals. Learning to use baking soda to remove odors and stains is probably one of the most important skills I have attained.

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You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Vade Mecum here ^[6]

I have a similarly high standard in food, refusing to eat and drink garbage, even though this means either paying through the nose for fine dining or purchasing ingredients and preparing the food myself. Quality has a cost, in money or in labor. But notice the common thread of everything here: The key skill to develop if one is to have a refined taste is the ability to say no.

To say no, to refuse, may be the most difficult of modern man’s feats. We are surrounded by ease and convenience. When I say no to a fast-food meal delivered to my doorstep, I elect to physically go to the farmer’s market, purchase the ingredients necessary, return home, prepare a meal from those ingredients, and then, che brutta, wash the dishes. When I say no to a polyester shirt or gray sweatpants, I refuse to purchase an item of clothing immediately, instead electing to wait until such a time that an opportunity to purchase a fine item of clothing presents itself. Since I’m shopping on a budget, this opportunity may not come for a long time. And of course, since I’m purchasing natural materials and not polyester, I am imposing on myself the cost and labor of washing them, since they can’t merely be tossed in the washer and dryer, but rather carefully treated if they are to retain their quality.

That is the answer I gave Mrs. Jeelvy: We stand out from these people because we have the ability to say no in the face of overwhelming pressure, and because we have the ability to choose self-denial in the face of convenience. We are the best-dressed people in the park for the same reason we refused to take the Covid vaccine and for the same reason we are White Nationalists: We have the ability to say no. We do not passively affirm, even in our consumer choices, but rather consciously and actively lead our lives in a way which pursues excellence.

The world offers you garbage clothing, garbage food, and garbage ideologies, and they’re very convenient to consume, but in order to pursue excellence, one must master the art of refusal, the art of saying no, repeatedly, stubbornly, and even when backed against the wall and given (seemingly) no choice. To say no is to choose the highway over someone else’s “my way.” It requires a strength of character and a willingness to forego ease and comfort for a higher goal, even in something as mundane as dressing or eating well.

The art of saying no has yet another level of mastery, however: Once the refuser has learned to say no, he of course must then learn to recognize the moment when he should say yes. Indeed, we could argue that every no we say is uttered in the service of a yet to be necessitated yes. When I refuse to wear garbage clothes or eat garbage foods, my refusal plants the seed to an affirmation of quality clothes and food. When a chaste virgin guards her virtue by saying no to temptation, this refusal is in service to the eventual marital yes, and her transformation into a woman. When a free man refuses to submit to illegitimate authority, his refusal is in the service of eventual submission to legitimate authority.

So, to move toward our ultimate conclusion, we must learn to say no until such a time that we should say yes. I am referring here to the directions and actions white identitarians and nationalists should take in the political arena. There are forces that are eager to take any action, influenced by the pressure of our demographic situation in the West. Some are willing to compromise their beliefs in the face of relentless governmental and institutional pressures against us so that we may engage in mainstream politics, choosing the system’s way rather than the highway. Others yet would rather give in to the pressure entirely and stop thinking about nationalism, focusing instead on winnable battles such as opposition to Covid and allied tyrannies or drag queen story hour, not understanding that the victories from the so-called winnable battles may be hollow ^[7]. All of these people and groups must learn to say no, and all of these people and groups must learn to accept the price of saying no, if they are to say it. Indeed, the steep price of saying no is what makes them say yes. By refusing to moderate, compromise, or abandon white identitarian nationalist positions, we expose ourselves to prosecution, deplatforming, inability to participate in electoral politics, exclusion from the global financial system — and of course, it’s a lot less fun than running around being a troublemaker.

People willing to compromise will often claim that those who do not compromise are doomed to irrelevancy, because by repeatedly saying no, they are excluded from mainstream discourse. These people are wrong, however. Mainstream discourse is struggling to keep White Nationalism out precisely because the facts on the ground have made White Nationalism relevant and inevitable. As white people are increasingly under threat, and crucially, as the ideologies and myths woven specifically to keep them saying yes to the system come undone, White Nationalism is not only becoming more relevant, but pretty soon it will be the only relevant ideological stance among white people. It has begun, and we are on the road to victory — though I won’t say that we can’t lose. We can indeed lose, if we say yes prematurely.

The system offers release valves: multiracial working-class populism, Christian nationalism, judeo-reaction, all manners of deradicalization schemes, and anything but white identitarian politics. We must fastidiously and consistently say no to these things. Only White Nationalism is good enough for us. We will brave the winds and currents of obscurity, and suffer the slings and arrows of prosecution and deplatforming, but we will refuse to budge from our position and will not consider changing our minds until we have become the political center and it is no longer possible to succeed in politics without being a White Nationalist. We will stubbornly and unyieldingly say no until such a time as we are given an offer to which we can say yes.

For this, we are willing to suffer any price. It means self-denial. It means obscurity and it means persecution. It means denying ourselves the euphoria of a hollow victory or the respite from struggle that a false success presents. While we welcome the mainstream’s movement toward our position, we remain unsatisfied and unwilling to compromise until the mainstream adopts our program in its entirety and purges itself of all anti-white ideology. We will accept nothing less than a radical reorganization of society into a state whose core constitutional mission is to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

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