Counter-Currents
2,868 words
I haven’t talked about movement drama in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much drama in a while. But when it rains, it pours. Over the last month, there has been a series of scandals and controversies that kept the conversations lively around the White Nationalist water cooler. Among them:
- Eric Striker leaves The Right Stuff.
- Nick Fuentes does a stream with Richard Spencer.
- Andrew Anglin withdraws his support for Nick Fuentes.
- The National Justice Party folds.
Some of these probably deserve their own article, and others don’t. But I will be combining them all into one article, because if you take all these stories together, there is a thread running through them. It appears that in December 2023, the Optics War, an issue which in many ways defined the American dissident Right over the past six years, has come to an end.
It started as a feud between The Daily Stormer and the Traditionalist Workers’ Party about the utility of public rallies, but then later expanded into a broader philosophical debate on strategy encompassing a range of issues, including how to tailor the message, who the target audience is, populism versus vanguardism, infiltration versus outsiderism, and what to do about unstable personalities and anti-social elements within our ranks.
The Optics War
What was the “Optics War”? That depends on who you ask, because everyone has their own version of the story. I can only give you the story as I saw it. Feel free to give your own version in the comments.
You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here
The Optics War proper began in late 2017, in the aftermath of Charlottesville. A main criticism of Charlottesville was that it was “trying to do the Internet in real life,” and a lot of it did not translate well. Many of the habits that had developed within the Alt Right when it was still an underground phenomenon became untenable once the scene entered the national spotlight. The culture of ironic fedposting that one could get away with before 2015, when no one was paying attention to us, led to some people being criminally charged once the Alt Right went under ZOG’s microscope. Charlottesville is now universally accepted as a disaster, but for a time, there were still a lot of people clamoring for another one. There were also those who claimed that if swastika flags had been a problem there, it was because there hadn’t been enough of them. For the dissident Right to get to the next level, something had to change.
More than anyone else, Ricky Vaughn and The Daily Stormer (Nick Fuentes was still a minor figure at this time) stepped forward and demanded a rebrand. Their proposal was American Nationalism. To understand their rationale, you must recall a major news story from the time: the National Football League’s (NFL) national anthem protests. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested what he considered to be a white supremacist police force by kneeling in front of the American flag during the national anthem. It sparked a national debate, many white Americans stopped going to NFL games, and matches began to be played in stadiums that were half-full. The American Nationalist argument was that the American flag is already seen as a symbol of white supremacy, and that since white Americans have a strong emotional attachment to it, we should drop all the Nazi imagery and replace it with Americanism.
People who agreed with this position were called “AmNats,” or by the more derogative term “optics cucks.” People who opposed this rebrand and preferred to draw inspiration from European fascism were the “NatSocs” (National Socialists), or the more derogative term “wignat.”
Ricky Vaughn and The Daily Stormer crew demanded that certain anti-social and bad-optic personalities should be shunned and marginalized. At first, this list of people was relatively small: Chris Cantwell, Paul Nehlen, Patrick Little, and a handful of Siege readers. But the biggest and most controversial of those on their list was the Traditionalist Workers’ Party. A feud between them and The Daily Stormer broke out on The Right Stuff’s message board and raged for weeks. Vaughn was also doxed during this period. Just as things were reaching a boiling point, the infamous “cuckbox incident” happened — if you know, you know — which resulted in an AmNat victory.
This resulted in what I like to call The Treaty of Cuckbox, wherein AmNat demands were met. One of the terms was that those who had participated in and/or condoned Vaughn’s doxing would be banished from the movement forever. The optics question then died down for a time as the Alt Right’s attention shifted to the ongoing Internet Bloodsports fad that had emerged on YouTube.
The Optics War picked up again in mid-2019, when relations between The Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff (TRS) broke down over TRS violating the terms of The Treaty of Cuckbox. A bizarre audio recording of a TRS guy talking about trannies also came to light. Stormer then threw its support behind America First as the anti-TRS. At this point the Optics War became movement-wide, with nearly everyone being forced to choose a side if for no other reason than because engaging with one camp would result in being shunned by the other. In the end, the resulting sides were roughly The Daily Stormer and America First and its associates on the AmNat side, versus The Right Stuff, Richard Spencer, and later Patriot Front on the NatSoc side.
I have skipped over a lot for the sake of brevity. The full story of the Optics War would be longer than War and Peace. If it were a movie, it would have a cast of thousands and star Charlton Heston. But that is the gist of it.
The End of the Optics War
The “Optics War” started winding down about a year ago, but not for the reasons people hoped. There was no epiphany where everyone said, “This infighting is pointless! Us pro-whites should all be on the same side!” What actually happened was that the rank-and-file on both sides became progressively disillusioned with their leadership. After both America First and the TRS-associated National Justice Party underwent a series of scandals, many loyalists began to wonder if their side really had as much moral superiority over the opposing camp as they had thought. In 2022, Fuentes lieutenant Jaden McNeil broke with America First (AF) and became AF’s leading critic, and a few months later, OG TRS personality Johnny Monoxide left and became a similar thorn in their side. Several Fuentes loyalists likewise left in the wake of the Ali Alexander scandal. These people might not have dropped out of the dissident Right, but they dropped out of the Optics War.
It should also be said that there are some people who never took a side. The British dissident Right in particular remained neutral, and some, such as Mark Collett and Ed Dutton, engaged with those on both sides. Keith Woods notably never chose a side, and even today supports both America First and Patriot Front. The Optics War was thus a distinctly American phenomenon.
The Breakup of the AmNat Alliance
Nick Fuentes announced earlier this month that he would be doing a livestream with Richard Spencer. This was in flagrant violation of The Treaty of Cuckbox. Spencer’s name was on the list of banned people, along with Matt Heimbach and Al Capone. Spencer wasn’t even allowed into the parking lot.
A wise man once told me, “A movement that is unable to shun bad actors is like a movement with AIDS.” At times, what constitutes a “bad actor” might be a matter of opinion. But the only thing harder than defining what a “bad actor” is, is explaining how Richard Spencer is not one. Spencer destroys everything he touches and has done more harm to the pro-white movement than Tim Wise could ever dream of. The Overton window shift we saw in 2023 could have happened five years earlier were it not for Richard Spencer.
Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer responded to the news of the Spencer-Fuentes stream by withdrawing his support for Fuentes. You can read Anglin’s official statement on it here. Anglin stated that he had been having some misgivings about Fuentes for some time, and that the Spencer stream was merely the last straw. Other issues cited were Fuentes’ inability to maintain the support of loyalists and Fuentes’ promotion of certain unsavory characters into positions of prominence, with predicably disastrous result. Anglin stressed that he does not consider Fuentes an enemy, but that Fuentes’ missteps, which have been increasing in both frequency and severity, makes America First something that he is unwilling to invest any more in.
For many years, the Daily Stormer-America First axis was the driving forces behind one side of the Optics War — and now it has been dissolved. With that, the dream of “centralizing” the dissident Right is dead. This dream goes back to the 2015 Alt Right movement, which aspired to become a unified front. Then came the Optics War, where there were two movements competing for preeminence. Now we are returning to our roots, where we are a collection of independent outlets that engage with some people and not with others based on our own particular criteria.
The Collapse of the National Justice Party
I don’t know all of TRS’ inner workings and what their rationales were, but my reading of the National Justice Party was that it was a response to America First’s political action conferences. It was a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. Starting in 2019, Fuentes was beginning to expand his operation from the Internet into the real-world space, and so there was intense pressure for the NatSoc side to do the same. In other words, it was a product of the Optics War.
Signs that there were major problems within the NJP began to become visible about a year ago, when NJP founder Greg Conte had a massive and messy falling out with the rest of the NJP leadership and made many bold accusations of mismanagement. I didn’t follow the story all that closely, but from what I understand, Conte did not come off particularly well, and many were willing to give NJP the benefit of the doubt that Conte was simply unhinged or bitter.
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But then more of the NJP’s top guys started leaving. One of them was apparently kicked out for having a threesome with two chicks from the party’s female wing. My first reaction to this was, “Finally! A dissident Right sex scandal that is actually heterosexual in nature!” Although upon further thought, the scandal is still potentially gay from the perspective of the two women.
The Tony Hovator scandal was a bit like the Ali Alexander scandal in the sense that he had displayed a number of red flags even before they brought him on board. One thing we have seen in Nick Fuentes’ loyalty and purity tests is that when those in an organization are made to take such tests, bad actors will simply memorize the answers beforehand. One of the initial reasons for the Optics War was the issue of how to marginalize unstable personalities in the movement. The NJP chose purity tests, but in the end were brought down by those unstable personalities that they failed to weed out and who were allowed to gain far too much power.
The most shocking departure from the NJP was Eric Striker, who was not only one of its founders but also a fan favorite on the TRS network. Whatever one may think of Striker, his personality and influence on TRS was undeniably profound.
In many ways, the history of TRS can be divided into pre- and post-Eric Striker. Before Eric Striker, the most persistent criticism of TRS was that it was not taking White Nationalism seriously, being more concerned with juvenile pranks and treating everything like a big joke. It was TRS guys who started doing the Roman salute during the infamous Hailgate incident in November 2016, for example. A few weeks later, TRS published an article advocating for the global extermination of all non-whites. Many were left thinking, “Bro, can you at least try to take this a little seriously?”
Eric Striker was an odd choice for TRS because he possessed none of the spirit of mischievous fun which, for better or worse, defined them in their early days. Striker was many things, but he’s not funny and doesn’t claim to be. He’s anti-whimsy. After Striker’s departure, however, TRS went from being the guys who used to piss people off by being unserious to taking themselves way too seriously. The tone became angrier and more confrontational. Humor was deemphasized in favor of serious deep dives. Part of this may have counter-branding in order to set themselves apart from Nick Fuentes’ middlebrow populist approach. Either way, TRS drifted further away from the spirit that made it popular in the first place.
Striker was also extremely divisive. People either love him or hold him up as an example of everything wrong with wignatism. He’s humorless, angry (he frequently loses his temper in debates), and has a penchant for unironic LARPing. His loss might be a short-term blow for TRS, but it also makes a course correction more likely.
Interestingly, one of the other pieces of gossip this month is that America First’s AFPAC4 conference, originally scheduled for December 18, was cancelled. Once the crown jewel of the America First movement, the future of AFPAC is uncertain. AFPAC 2 and 3 were major coups because Fuentes was able to bring in elected officials from the national stage, a feat unlikely to be repeated post-Kanye. He might still be able to do an impressive all-e-celeb AFPAC where he gets Alex Jones and other big-name Internet personalities, but it would still be seen as a step down in prestige from the days when he had sitting Congressmen. It’s also notable that Patriot Front has not held a march since May. It may be that real-world activism in general is not as cost-effective as it was in the immediate post-Elon era.
Therefore, if NJP existed as a NatSoc response to AFPAC, there might not in fact need to be any response any longer if we have in fact seen the last AFPAC.
Some say TRS is finished, but I’m uncertain. What I will say is that I don’t see a path forward for them that does not involve them making peace with Elon-Twitter/X. If they do, who knows? We’re in an era where anything can happen. There have been some stunning overnight successes on Elon-Twitter/X. Also, the Internet is a big place. I had come to think a while ago that Nick Fuentes had no more bridges left to burn, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t keep winning over new admirers. It’s almost become trendy to virtue-signal your support for free speech by saying, “I support free speech . . . even for Nick Fuentes!” Many of these new admirers come from adjacent spheres. One might think that they only like him because they don’t know his history, but such people are not particularly invested in the internal dynamics and drama of the White Nationalist scene, besides the fact that dissident Right scandals are rather tame compared to those elsewhere on the Internet.
TRS could attempt the Autumn Groyper method of creating an anonymous account and then letting it filter through word of mouth that it’s you. Elon does not seem to be cracking down on such ban evasion, even when an account is held by Nick Fuentes. It could be that TRS is higher on his blacklist than Fuentes, and thus they would still get banned, but it would be worth a try — and I don’t see any alternative.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that now that the Optics War is over, the wignats and optics cucks are going to come together and become one big, happy family. Grudges will still be held and old criticisms will still ring true. Disagreements will also persist. All I am saying is that the Optics War as a saga has run its course. Elon Musk buying Twitter was a black-swan event that completely changed the paradigm. Under intense censorship and stagnant audience growth, there was an incentive to fight over the scraps, but on Elon Musk Twitter/X, there’s enough room for everyone, and thus there’s no need to fight.
Musk has effectively taken the issue of optics out of our hands, and going forward, he will be the one who decides what optics you can get away with on the most important platform in the world.
I see the role of the dissident Right for the foreseeable future as that of the think tank which more mainstream Rightists steal their ideas from. And I’m fine with that. For years, people have longed to see the dissident Right “go mainstream” and have /OurGuys/ out there, all over the national media, but I’ve come to think that it might be better to just let purple-pilled folks such as Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson soak up the brunt of the establishment’s ire while the dissident Right flies under the radar as a steadily growing word-of-mouth phenomenon.
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34 comments
“The Daily Stormer crew demanded that . . . bad-optic personalities should be shunned and marginalized.”
Doesn’t Andrew Anglin – of Daily Stormer fame – specialise in being outrageously offensive and provocative? Never thought of him as being overly concerned with “optics”, which in common parlance refers to the way things are perceived by the public.
I thought so at the time, which is why his overnight Christian/AmNat reorientation rang hollow to me, like a cynical ploy.
I’m not a specialist in American factions, far from it, but it seemed to me that this Andrew Anglin was one of the big promoter of the fake Hollywood Nazism, in the Alt-right, to its great detriment.
And that he mocked the death of this overweight lady, in Charlottesville, leading to his internet ban. And a lot of struggle for the Alt-Right.
If this is good optics, maybe…
Like Anne, I think his last conversion to Christianism ( of which he understands nothing ) is a ” marketing ” ploy.
In fact, I think he is an agent provocateur.
I appreciate Eric striker, though.. very good writer.
I’m not an American but here is my 2 cents.
I enjoyed some of the speeches that I’ve seen online from NJP.
I think justicereport.news is an excellent project. We need our own media websites (all kinds).
The community building initiatives that they share on their social media look very good. We need more of that.
The local government/city council activism that they encouraged was very good. See the following link for an example
https://t.me/promatDivision/1584 – We especially need more of this. One video like this can go so far.
I think their IRL activism was good (always room for improvement of course)
https://t.me/warrenbalogh88/7661 – We need people taking up physical space, with signs and fliers ready to hand out to the public. The flier should also be turned into a meme to share online.
Their White Christmas project is excellent.
It’s good they have a separate female organisation, unfortunate someone couldn’t manage their urges.
I don’t know the inner details of what happened, but from the outside, Warren especially comes across as the most sensible. Followed by Mike.
Not sure what is going on with Eric and Tony. Tony especially comes across as a childish brat. He has turned their telegram channel into a place to post people’s private messages. These people should have greater commitment to the cause. They are embarrassing.
I hope as much as possible can be salvaged, but I also hope people learn their lessons.
I don’t think they should continue calling themselves a ‘party’ whatever they choose to rebrand it.
I agree with Nathan Damigos Telegram post here
https://t.me/NathanDamigo/1929
Why do we need to “take up physical space”?
Hi Greg, very late but I meant to reply to this sooner and I want to clarify what I wrote.
When I wrote “we need to take up physical space”, I just mean that there are productive forms of public protest/stunts/activism. I think you have previously said that the type of activism that Generation Identity did in Europe years ago was good.
I am not defending stupid forms of activism that make us look fringe, weak, disorganised and unprofessional.
I actually think a counter currents article on good and bad activism would be useful to the movement.
There’s a very good in-depth series about what happened to the NJP and TRS over at https://dailyrake.ca/. It also works as a case study on grassroots political orgs., so definitely worth a read, even if you’re not into e-drama.
I agree. The Daily Rake series is well-written and well-researched. It should be studied carefully by people who are serious about activism and organizing, if only to learn what does not work.
Sadly, by documenting massive incompetence, laziness, stupidity, duplicity, bad faith, personality disorders, and genuine grifting, it also makes a crushing case against taking the whole TRS crew seriously ever again, even as podcasters, much less as activists.
White Votes Count:
2024 is about how to inject white consciousness into the political process, whether it has any effect on that process or not.
Please consider advancing the message WHITE VOTES COUNT for the next 319 days.
You can do this whether or not you believe there is any point to voting. Good faith is not a requirement. Nor is US citizenship. This is about moving another half-step closer to winning by raising white racial consciouness.
If civilians begin to repeat this slogan, it may be amplified by the antiwhite media. If the antiwhite media begins to repeat it, it may be amplified by civilians.
What we want is a self-reinforcing dynamic that pounds home the message that Whites Vote, and that the White Vote as something to be explicitly pandered to.
We also want to get past nonsense about optics, and who was right or wrong about things that ultimately don’t really matter all that much in the scheme of white self-determination: Trump, Covid, Ukraine, etc.
White Votes Count could become a shit test for GOP politicians, a rationale for an electoral boycott, a way to divide the conservative movement, a means of identifying bad actors, drama merchants and terminal contrarians in the pro-white movement, final proof of the bankruptcy of the electoral system, maybe all the above.
Or none of the above. Which is fine so long as the message becomes pervasive throughout the target population, whether they like it or not.
If WHITE VOTES COUNT is memed well and hard, it will not matter whether votes count or not, because the only part of the slogan that matters is WHITE.
Mike brought a lot of people into this. There will always be that.
I’d like to think that he could somehow just go back to podcasting, which is what Sven sounds like he wants to do. They will still have an audience. If the Daily Rake series is accurate, it sounds like a lot of young men will have a hard time letting go of that scene and growing up, and some likely won’t.
But I think you are right.
It is not like there were no redflags: getting out of the Charlottesville trial, Jayoh, spending all of 2020 pretending an election wasn’t happening. There were never any satisfactory explanations for any of this stuff.
It is almost always better to err on the side of honesty and transparency. By failing to do this, TRS ended up unironically behaving like Jews.
I think it’s important to “take up physical space’. Not because it’s an easier or more important way to spread our message. But because it shows people that white Nationalism is real. It isn’t just an internet porn addiction. I also think it’s healthy for individuals who identify with white nationalism to see Promat and other materials in the wild. It tells them friends are near. It also keeps them from feeling like their white nationalism is akin to porn addiction- an impulse they indulge using their phone and then forget about or repress when they close the tab.
I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to take up space.
Explain to me how “Blood Tribe” taking up space is a good thing.
Basically you have offered “therapy” arguments for the extremely online. But this is politics, not therapy.
I have no quarrel with flyers and stickers, but demonstrations that demonstrate that we are merely a small, poorly organized minority are not a good idea, especially since they can attract antifa and police persecution, which we don’t really need.
Is this a new site? A quick glance and it seems to be written by someone with firsthand knowledge of what happened. An insider with an ax to grind.
Credit where credit is due it seems line the NJP was doing legit activism with the East Palestine environmental disaster.
I had a feeling things weren’t going well for them given that Fash The Nation (FTN) has been off the air for awhile. I’m not a fan of their overt anti-Semitism but they are often quite funny and inciteful with their deep dives. Hearing them mispronounce Hebrew and Yiddish (I.e. saying “chuzpah” with a “ch” as in cheese as opposed to the “ch” in “Bach”) was both cringe and funny. It was a great podcast, I think even better than “The Daily Shoah.”
I think that is a problem for a lot of people in this line of work. On the one side it seems like TRS/NJP wanted to do serious activism which was more the NJP side of things. TRS wanted to be both funny and to be taken seriously. Fuentes went from courting Congressmen to then realizing he wants to court catbois and incel gamers. People aren’t sure of their goal/direction and then unwanted stuff happens.
Look at Charlottesville It is the irony of ironies how the unite the right rally basically fractured the right on top of the fact that the statue was desecrated.
1)Could somebody link to the Fuentes/Spencer livestream. I want to be entertained.
2) The reason Charlottesville turned into such a disaster is because the system came down so hard on the demonstrators. They didn’t do anything wrong, but were attacked and accused by a media and government apparatus in sync against us. It would have been difficult for highly capable people to come off well, let alone a group of youngish amateurs, mixed with some admittedly transgressive elements. It’s because our political adversaries(whoever they may implicitly be) understand that positive white identity is the only political force that can oppose them, hence they demonize and stamp it out before it’s ever born.
“They didn’t do anything wrong”
Yes they did. They announced what they were doing in advance. They increased the possibility of something going wrong. Greg has written about this elsewhere on CC.
I wasn’t reading CC back then but apparently there were people warning against what they did. Those warnings were ignored.
Strategically speaking, yes, they did things wrong, and the whole boondoggle may have been a mistake seeing the aftermath, but I’m saying they did nothing wrong objectively. The system was against them.
I thought at the time and ever since that had they gone home after the torch light rally it would have been a masterstroke.
“Charlottesville is now universally accepted as a disaster”
It turned into something with extraordinarily unfortunate effects for some people there, with some negative consequences downstream for many others. However quite a lot of the latter would have happened at some point anyway.
Disaster wouldn’t be my first choice of word. There’s nothing much to learn from a “disaster” other than complete avoidance.
I like Jason Kessler a lot. I’ve seen nothing so far to make me doubt him. I think his intentions were sound.
Massive injustice crushing white people can happen quite without swastikas.
I have no problem with Anglin’s direction on this.
Spencer doesn’t seem to stand for anything anymore. One questions in hindsight if he ever did. He’s an attention seeking time waster trying to backpeddle about race when it suits him, then move a bit closer towards it if it gets him some more transient attention or he thinks it’s cool again, only so he can move away again and go back to posting support for globohomo stuff.
“With that, the dream of “centralizing” the dissident Right is dead.”
Centralizing….might not be the best plan anyway. Broad umbrella is better.
Is there a central command for Jewish power ? There are different Jewish organizations and leaders of those organizations, along with powerful Jewish lobbyists and donors and journalists who push Jewish ideas through the media. Probably some of these various Jewish groups are not that fond of each other but reach a consensus on some issues.
I haven’t listened to TRS in many years. I liked it a lot years ago.
“wignatism”….
I don’t know Striker’s activities on TRS. I may have heard one or two interviews with him with others and nothing particularly shocked me. But I’ve mostly only read some of Striker’s articles.
From what I’ve read he’s probably the best journalist I’ve seen on the right.
We have tons of excellent writers, but his style is more journalistic and extremely hard hitting and with tremendous clarity. I think his coverage different topics is superb. I have no problem with anything he’s written I’ve seen. If someone were calling that writing “wignatism” it is just bitter soypilling.
There are going to be strong issues of disagreement like Russia/Ukraine, Israel and so on. There are disagreements on the left too on these topics.
We don’t all collapse and give up though. Trying to “resolve” and unify things is an extremely destructive human tendency. Energies in that direction for anything more than a broad umbrella are a bad idea.
From the start, Striker has plagiarized anti-American media out of Russian and Iran and passed it off as journalism. In my limited interactions with him, he has consistently engaged in two behaviors: lying and grandstanding. His grandstanding, moreover, has the character of pandering to morons. His analysis also tends toward the paranoid, and paranoids are generally liars. Anglin is hardly a reliable source, but for what it is worth, he claims that he dumped Striker from the Stormer for making up things. Such people add no value to this movement.
I haven’t seen anything he’s written on Russia or Iran. I’ve heard he’s expressed some views about Russia that were not liked here.
Plagiarized sounds like a strong word. If he lifted text whole cloth or near to, it would be pathetic. Do you mean he was influenced ?
The original complaint about Striker made by the author was wignatism which I responding to.
I wish I could remember the articles I’ve seen of Striker’s on Unz, but I’ve seen things he’s written on the justice system which I thought were exceptionally good.
However, I did not fact check what he was writing. It seemed to be in line with a lot of other things that are facts, although that doesn’t make something factual.
If he is just making stuff up then that’s bad. It’s wasting everyone’s time.
Years ago there was a reporter type person, some people will remember who, who did a lot of material around Israel and the 9/11 stuff, was well admired in the patriot circles, but questions came up about how much of what he was writing was actually true. And he kept pushing more and more dubious and stupid stories. After increasing suspicions and a bizarre public meltdown he was fired for submitting false stories from his employer as well making outlandish allegations about his employer.
I guess what I’m saying is the right is indeed vulnerable to people feeding it what wants to hear. Although in Striker’s case I’ve only seen a few articles that have appeared on Unz, and nothing stood out to me as suspicious.
Usually I’m pretty sensitive to fake news. I’m always stunned at our people reposting obvious fake crap on social media that someone’s made up without even thinking about it.
It’s possible Striker flew under my radar. But I expect a large chunk of what he’s writing is generally correct. I will review his last couple of articles and reassess.
Thanks Greg.
One guy who got shot up pretty bad (several times) in various stages of the Optics War is Matt Parrott, who has been recently published & interviewed on Counter Currents. What’s his take on all this?
Matt has been commenting on Twitter. He is feeling vindicated.
Ah, thanks. Gave up that addiction a few years ago. Matt IS vindicated, IMO.
Thanks for clarifying some of this drama. Like others I’m befuddled that The Daily Stormer and others that flirt with Nazi imagery is a good image to grow the ranks with functional people. Why not align with ancient Greece or Rome, Vikings, Olde England, etc? A lack of imagination perhaps. A good idea to occasionally have a look at the “Are we the baddies?” sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
“Nazi” is basically just German shorthand pronunciation for Nationalist. It is another brand of White Nationalism and nothing to run away from. In the eyes of the Left, even the most spergy Libertarian is already a Nazi.
I somewhat take exception to labelling “Nat-Socs” as Wigger Nationalists. A Wigger is a White punk who speaks Ebonics and listens to Rap music. WigNat is just name-calling and not a real Optics Debate emanating from the atrocious aftermath of Charlottesville.
Aside from purging actual criminals and anti-socials from the WN movement, can the uncouth White “ebonists” actually be saved? I don’t know. When lost souls join movements like tent revivals and proclaim their new-found salvation, that is exactly when the early-warning radars should be lighting up the most. I have my own ideas about vetting activist members, but that is not really what we are talking about here.
“Optics” remains an integral part of propaganda in any case, and one of the things that bothered me the most about Charlottesville is that a lot of bumpkins were wearing their “Grugness” on their sleeves. I’m not talking about the one swastika flag or about welders or Rednecks, but simple slovenliness and a lack of preparation. The Boy Scout motto is Be Prepared for a reason.
The point is for public visibility, so it is not the best look to sport unkempt beards, beer bellies, filthy tatts, piercings, and plastic Stahlhelms if you are trying to be taken seriously. No offense is meant to middle-aged working class guys with beer bellies.
The goal here is to NORMALIZE ideas that are now unreasonably beyond the pale, and to force a debate that the System does not want to have.
One thing I really liked about the NJP is that they were able to project a youthful image of clean-cut and disciplined activists. Yeah, Striker played the clown in the wifebeater T-shirt, perhaps, but it was a pretty good performance.
Only the (presumably) unhinged Conte ever publicly acknowledged that they were indeed open to following Commander Rockwell’s guidelines on Legal, Psycological and Political Warfare, updated for the 21st century. If these principles had been applied competently at Charllottesville or with J6, the outcomes would have been far more satisfactory.
I kept asking for a straight answer about this on TRS posts and never got a satisfactory response. To me this is fundamental ─ and it has been understood since the 1960s that the System will treat Leftist activists differently than those on the Right, especially White Power advocates.
That is why a Unite the Right rally was fraught with basic issues from the start. For one thing, there was no central discipline or organization regarding events and what was meant to be accomplished by the disparate Rightwing groups invited to public spaces, other than some kind of White people’s Kumbayah. We know how that worked out and what the media said about us.
At Charlottesville the main purpose of the protest was to register disapproval with the Leftist/Establishment plans to destroy the General Lee monument. This means that the theme should have been Old Glory and the Confederate Battle Flag, and not any number of “Krinklejammers” or fringe causes.
The secondary purpose was to trigger the Establishment into hysterical overreach. Why is it Hate when White people express their interests? Why is it necessary to suppress the speech of White people? Why are White advocates called Terrorists by the corporate mass-media?
The NJP actually achieved this political jujitsu quite brilliantly in a few instances. For example, they actually got two U.S. Senators shilling on behalf of the Negro who massacred a bunch of White people with his motor vehicle during an oh-too-White Thanksgiving parade. The NJP protested the softball handling of this Hate Crime without getting guys tossed into jail or sued by Jewish extremists.
It is risky and I am not sure if the bang is worth the cost and the effort, but I think IRL activism, and especially local organizing, remains important. Yes, we do need to occupy these spaces or potentially to do so. The system prefers that we just keep quiet and read Savitri Devi or some kind of esoteric poetry.
That White people ARE organized for non-violent political protest as a policy, along with free-speech advocacy, that needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
I’m pretty sure that Mr. Peinovich understands all of the above, but the earlier TRS/NJP policy of ignoring constructive criticism and eschewing transparency was bound to cause a major problem.
This is not because it looks too “democratic” but simply because the best leadership principles do involve dispelling rumors by disseminating actual facts authoritatively and appropriately, albeit minus drama and gossip. If you fail in this, then you let the enemy write the narrative.
This is what Rockwell warned against and what he was thinking about when he was trying to find ways to break the media blackout and disinformation regime.
Finally, I disagree that the TRS network is on the wrong track. They do transgress safe Kosher spaces by being willing to challenge the Holocaust and to disagree with Jews. That would be important if for no other reason than that it brings down the direct wrath of the ADL and the ZOG system itself. That is how you know you are over the target. And you either survive it or you don’t.
I am sure that they could collect more subscriptions and donations by just being edgy trad-Catholics, or Lolbertarians, or whatever flavor-of-the-month pool party club whose members occasionally say the N-word but don’t ever touch the so-called Jewish Question. But then what would be the point? We don’t need more all-male “drinking clubs.”
Is Race an issue or isn’t it? Is there a legitimate Jewish Question or not?
I agree that edgy conspiracy theories work better for entertainment rather than as competent analysis, and that not everything revolves around Joos. I was a big critic of some of the FTN Deep Dives that people liked so much. Yes, I realize it is a podcast network and not an actual history course, but to the best of my knowledge not one of them had an actual History degree. Striker at least has a degree in journalism if I understand correctly.
Striker actually started shilling for North Korea on one podcast. Oh boy. And Striker actually tried to equate some Jew pharmaceutical company with “Genocide” because they produced an opioid pain drug which has been used since 1913. Well, the Sacklers over-marketed their wares and should be held to account, but the overdose epidemic is caused by smuggled fentanyl and not by Boomers with back pain and Social Security checks. And speaking as somebody who got hit by a heroin junkie running a red light and nearly killed, I have very little personal sympathy for White Trash drug addicts.
If I had to give one reason why I decided not to get involved with the NJP, it would be that I didn’t like the Leftist vibe coming from some of their members. It is bad enough that most of the leadership has Libertarian priors, but I didn’t even know how bad the NJP management actually was. It almost sounds like the cadet school kids organizing their own Lord of the Flies when the adults go missing.
Also, I don’t (generally speaking) consider recruiting Leftists to necessarily be a winning strategy for White Nationalism. It depends.
There is lots more to say but I have pontificated enough. I do think the TRS network has a great future ahead for it. I also think that political organizing and space occupation (especially on the local level) is going to become increasingly essential.
I encourage open-debate on these issues. That is exactly what we need, and so far I have found Counter-Currents to be a great place to do so.
🙂
The dividing lines of the optics war never made any sense. The optics cucks had The Daily Stormer which like a month before that all kicked off was flying swastika banners, and the wignats had Patriot Front which was about as perfect of optics as you could possibly craft.
That’s because the “Optics War” had almost nothing to do with “optics”. It was about ideology. “Optics” was merely a front for what was an ideological conflict between groups too dishonest or cowardly to say that’s what it was. But in the end the Trump shilling, weirdly pro-America wing failed to turn the entire WN sphere into a republican grifting operation. And that’s a good thing.
No, it really was about optics. In fact, I think it was Nathan Damigo who fired the first shot in the optics war by describing the Trad Worker people as “pretty cringe” after one of the post-Charlottesville rallies, I think Pikesville. Damigo wasn’t working for the Republicans, obviously.
I agree with Greg. It definitely was about optics.
At one time, 2014-2018 timeframe, I was an onion layer or two outside the core of multiple groups. I was engaged in social media groups on several platforms that were formed by or interacted with multiple groups. There was also a lot of cross pollination going on between all of these groups.
There were various flavors of Christian Nationalists, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. There were Southern Nationalists. Bloggers, groups, podcasters etc. There were the “Chans” from “Pol”. There was TRS. TWP, Daily Stormer, trad wife homeschoolers and antivaxxers, NazBol, etc. There were libertarians with race realist tendencies like Stefan Molyneux. There was the Manosphere, the Paleocons, NRX people, etc. There were people whose primary concern was immigration, and some who were only concerned with doing YouTube content about Bell Curve and crime statistics. Then you have the JQ and all it entails. People were sharing ideas and it was an interesting time, but ultimately there were deep chasms that could never be overcome.
In my opinion, there’s a great deal of ideological difference between people whose background might be more traditionalist and “conservative” vs those who are nationalist and race realist, but also come from a very liberal and progressive family.
I myself come from a family that has always leaned toward voting for Republicans. I know that people like my family are “reachable”. They do understand the problems. Yes they can be very simple minded, but they are typically the core people who aren’t ashamed of feeling a sense of nationalism and tribalism. Nevermind the politicians and political class people who claim to be Republicans. I’m talking about the man on the street.
OTOH, some of these people have a background around liberal people and a liberal family, and while they are smart enough to see the cultural problems that a pluralistic society creates, and even recognize how the liberal democratic mindset has facilitated that problem, they hate “normies” and “conservatives” too much to ever identify with the man on the street.
a lot of the ideological problems that caused the optics war to fracture everything can be traced back to these different mindsets. People can agree on lots of things. But if they still hate each other for some trivial reasons, it will only lead to this same problem.
Mostly agree ─ but in photographs that I have seen, Patriot Front used a lot of masked activists.
Masked faces are always an optics fail. It makes it look like you are doing something unseemly and wrong by advocating for your interests as White people.
Anybody who cannot withstand the level of doxxing inherent for non-violent pro-White protests should not be an activist at the public level.
One of the disasters of Charlottesville was that it allowed the system to successfully posit that White people advocating for their heritage ─ in respecting the General Lee memorial ─ was inherently wrong and violent.
This failure allowed those filthy Communists and Libtards who would violate our White heritage to pose as though they were doing something pure and noble.
🙂
If you ignored the optics war to the best of your ability and concentrated on spreading pro-White language, messages, and memes, you probably did the best you could have.
There’s an analogy to be made about the Dissident Right today and the situation with the various radical and nationalist groups at work in the run-up to the 1917 Russian Revolution.
In the decades prior to 1917, there was an ever-shifting array of conflicting factions, ideologies, tactical approaches, personalities and what not. Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Constitutional Democrats, every marching variety of Anarchist and Nihilist, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, they were all in the fray.
It was this very ferment which gave the revolutionary movements both the energy and the initiative which provided the metapolitical high ground. To be a revolutionary was to be at the leading edge, and when you are at that edge – people follow!
The ferment also made it difficult for the existing Russian regime to suppress these movements as they were not so much an organization but an entire state of mind (think 21st century chaos and networking models). All this paid off in 1917 at Petrograd and Moscow when the regime collapsed in the face of multiple crises.
The same point can be made about the nationalist movements of the era: Finns, Baltic, Poles, Ukrainians. Nationalists spent decades preparing for the day when they could stake their claim for independence. When the Russian Empire broke up in 1918, they made their move.
Today as we go into 2024 the Regime is facing crises, anything which wrecks its facade of legitimacy. It could be an economic collapse, a lost war, a wave of massive civil disturbances, another mindless lockdown, a fraudulent election. The Dissident Right cannot cause these crises. But it can be in position to exploit the ensuing scramble for power.
Something to think about in the continuing chaos…
Had to look up Blood Tribe. Based on the pictures at the ADL website, I can see several Optics problems.
The first is tatts and those abominable shaved heads. Facial tatts are especially degenerate for White people. And facial masks are always an Optics Fail.
Secondly, politics is essential. I can’t really tell from their Blood Tribe aesthetics what they stand for politically.
Is it Golf, Cheese, and Chess? ─ or Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash?
As I’ve said before, we don’t need more all-male drinking clubs.
Contrast these poor optics with the ADL website photo of the National Justice Party at Waukesha, protesting the Darrell Brooks Hate Crime. This joker ultimately got six consecutive life sentences, but why was it never called a Hate Crime? We know it would have been if the races had been reversed. And, unfortunately, those nice Germans in Wisconsin don’t even have the death penalty in their state.
The NJP kept their pro-White messaging simple, on point, and relevant ─ in great contrast to Charlottesville, where the generic Right protesting the vandalism of the General Lee statute somehow got turned into an establishment crusade against mindlessly assaulting dumb, fat Liberal chicks.
😉
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