1,927 words
The year was 2016. Donald Trump had just stunned the world by getting elected despite the entire media establishment being against him. The only support Trump had during his campaign was on the Internet, particularly the Alt Right, which was spreading across social media like a virus and pied-pipering the youth into White Nationalism.
On the Left, there was an increasing demand that they produce their own version of the Alt Right — some kind of Internet-based scene that was edgy, ironic, and intelligent with a veneer of anti-establishment cool as well as fluency in meme culture. And so it was that around this time, rumblings began in the Lefty media about something called “the Dirtbag Left.” The Dirtbag Left was going to be a bizarro version of the Alt Right.
Centered on the flagship podcast Chapo Trap House and its associated personalities, the Dirtbag Left was Bernie Broism on steroids in the same way that the Alt Right had taken Trumpism to the next level. They carved out a difference between themselves and mainstream Democrat politics similar to how the Alt Right defined themselves against cuckservatives. The Dirtbag Left fetishized Marxism in a way guaranteed to fluster your conservative parents similar to the way the Alt Right dalliance with Nazi imagery triggered your liberal parents. The Dirtbag Left also offered its own, more politically-correct criticisms of woke culture. And whereas the Alt Right’s problem with woke was that it was anti-white, the Dirtbag Left’s gripe was that it obscured class struggle and undermined worker solidarity. Comparisons between Chapo Trap House and The Daily Shoah abounded.
For a time, the Dirtbag Left was a significant force in Internet politics, and one of the dissident Right’s main rivals given that the two movements had very similar target audiences: young, middle-class whites of above average intelligence. At their peak, the hosts of Chapo Trap House would boast of the countless thousands whom they had “saved from going down the Nazi rabbit hole.”
The Dirtbag Left had several structural advantages over the dissident Right. For one, they had a slew of outspoken celebrity fans who were happy to promote their content as well as a degree of mainstream media support. Chapo Trap House had puff pieces written about them in major outlets such as The Guardian, The New Republic, Spiked, Salon, GQ, and countless others.
Yet, the Dirtbag Left’s star has dimmed considerably of late. I can’t remember the last time I heard the name of TrueAnon. Whatever happened to them? The reasons for its decline are complex and manifold, but I will offer what I think are the five main causes of their fall from grace.
1. Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter
The Dirtbag Left was one of the primary beneficiaries of social media censorship. It was during the era of post-Trump, pre-Elon Twitter that the Dirtbag Left reached its peak. After all the main influencers of the dissident Right were scrubbed from social media, the Dirtbag Left (and to a lesser extent, NRx) had a virtual monopoly on high-IQ, unwoke political discourse. As a result, the remaining dissident Rightists on the platform ended up engaging with content by figures such as Aimee Terese, Anna Khachian, and Sean McCarthy for no other reason than because that was the closest thing to the dissident Right which you could find on social media at the time. For all its flaws, it was at least anti-Zionist, and those who propagated such anti-capitalist and materialist critiques of power — the Dirtbag Left’s bread and butter — were inoffensive people of identitarian sensibilities. To put it in meme language, they were “the dissident Right at home.”
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter opened up the free market of ideas, and the Dirtbag Left has had to compete with the dissident Right for an audience on a level playing field for the first time since 2016 — and have been largely been swept away in the far-Right revolution in that is in progress on Elon’s app. As anti-Zionists, the Bernie Left has been able to make some hay out of the post-October 7 zeitgeist, but their non-racist, anti-Zionist critiques of Israel (“Jews are fine. It’s the ideology of Zionism!”) appear tepid and incomplete when presented side-by-side with the fuller content on the Jewish Question coming from the Right.
2. The Loss of Bernie Sanders and Lack of a Clear Successor
The Dirtbag Left’s honeymoon with the media came to a crashing halt in 2020. After Bernie Sanders pulled off some surprise upset victories early in the primaries, the entire Democrat establishment sharpened its knives and descended on the Sanders movement, including his supporters in the Dirtbag Left. After years of being championed as the great Alt Right deradicalizers of the Internet, hit pieces started coming hot and heavy that accused Chapo Trap House and other Dirtbag Left personalities of being misogynistic crypto-Nazis. With the dissident Right already purged from social media, it appeared that the Dirtbag Left had outlived its usefulness to the establishment.
After his failure in the 2020 primaries, Bernie Sanders was now too old to be socialism’s next great hope. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was supposed to be Bernie Sanders’ successor, proved to be a disappointment to the true believers. Shortly after arriving in Washington, AOC started dabbling in the sort of alienating identity politics that Sanders — at least initially — tried to avoid. At one infamous Sanders campaign event, AOC even gave a speech wherein she advocated for the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some blame AOC for Sanders’ 2020 campaign becoming a bastardized, woke version of his 2016 effort.
The loss of Bernie Sanders had a crippling effect on the socialist movement in America. For one, it was demoralizing. Ordinary people are more likely to engage with a movement that looks like it is winning or at least making progress toward an eventual win. Without Sanders, there appeared to be no more hope on the horizon.
Sanders had also been useful as a rallying point for a movement whose history has been plagued with infighting. As bad as infighting is on the Right, it is far worse on the Marxist Left, where squabbles will break out over the minutest differences in the interpretation of dogma Take the case of the Socialist Party, which was on the rise in America at the time of the First World War. Then, in 1919, the party split between pro- and anti-Bolsheviks, causing the pro-Bolsheviks to break away and form their own group — and then that group started infighting and split in two.
The Israel-Gaza War may temporarily offer the Left a new rallying point, but when that war winds down, you can expect infighting and acrimony to return to the Left.
3. Scandals and Setbacks at Chapo Trap House
As the flagship podcast of the Dirtbag Left, it is up to Chapo Trap House to generate much of the movement energy, but it has found itself taking some hits in recent years. In 2021, they hosted Virgil Texas, an Oriental guy who is arguably the show’s most explicitly anti-white host. Texas then announced that he was leaving the show to start a new podcast called Bad Faith with former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Brianha Joy Gray, who was also a writer for The Hill. Shortly after this was announced, one Jennifer Seberg emerged and accused Virgil Texas of grooming her when she still underage, claiming that he had asked her for nude photos of herself.
Virgil Texas vanished from social media, never to be seen again, shortly after these accusations emerged. This was a black stain on Chapo Trap House that was made even worse by their refusal to address the issue after it came to light. I’ve heard that rumors of Virgil Texas’ bad behavior with underage girls had been floating around for a while — which, if true, means that Chapo Trap House had been shielding a predator.
To make matters worse, in 2023 host Matt Christman — in my opinion, the most talented member of their team — suffered a stroke, and it is unknown if or when he will ever return to the show.
4. The Rise of the Anti-Capitalist Right
When the Dirtbag Left first started gaining attention in 2016, the Alt Right’s main influencers were overwhelmingly ex-libertarians who had turned White Nationalist after learning that brown people overwhelmingly vote for big government. In libertarianism, economics is the be-all and end-all, and after black-pilling on it, some went all the way to the other end of the spectrum and began claiming that economics is irrelevant when compared to race and culture. Many came to believe that economic issues are a red herring that the establishment uses to distract people from white genocide. Some common refrains at the time were that an all-white society could make even a bad economic system work, or that Communist East Germany was still preferable to any Sub-Saharan country.
This was an area that, for a time, gave the Dirtbag Left something of an edge in that they delved deeply into materialist analyses and structural critiques. Then Keith Woods came along. In his early days in the scene, he made several videos making the case for socialism and against capitalism from a Right-wing perspective. This was possibly the first Keith Woods controversy: the accusation that he was a crypto-commie. Now, I understand that Keith Woods was not the first anti-capitalist White Nationalist, nor was he even the first anti-capitalist on the dissident Right. Eric Striker and Matt Heimbach were likewise avowed anti-capitalists, for example. But from my own observations, it was only after Woods came along that it became fashionable on the dissident Right to be anti-capitalist and/or identify as a Third Positionist.
In the end, the dissident Right developing their own critiques of capitalism and economic structural analyses made us more competitive with the Dirtbag Left.
5. Defections to the Right
Several figures associated with the Dirtbag Left movement now identify as Right-wing, or are de facto Right-wing. The most notable examples of this are Aimee Terese, who fell in with Bronze Age Pervert’s (BAP) sphere and the Red Scare podcast who, despite their name, now promote race realism and hobnob with Right-wing personalities lsuch as Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Mr. Race Realism himself: Steve Sailer. There are so many ex-Leftists turned Right-wingers nowadays that they formed their own scene in New York known as the Dimes Square scene.
I had predicted that many of the Dirtbag Left would defect to the Right, but unfortunately, few defected to the dissident Right (the real one). Rather, the BAP sphere seems to be the main destination for ex-Dirtbag Lefties. That said, many of them have started coopting the term “dissident Right,” which creates a lot of confusion and annoyance. I occasionally see tweets where people discuss how the Dissident Right is being flooded with transsexuals and such. These people aren’t talking about us; rather, they are talking about this Dimes Square scene, where ex-Leftists abound.
This is an annoying development, as I would bet that 99% of these people have no idea where the term comes from and couldn’t even name the person who coined it (it was John Derbyshire). “Dissident Right” was a rebranding of “Alt Right”, which was a rebranding of “White Nationalist.” But some of these new converts use it as a catch-all term meaning “not your daddy’s conservatism.”
I expect this trend to continue, and hopefully the BAP sphere proves to be a gateway to White Nationalism. Certainly on Elon Twitter/X, the Right is now undeniably where “the action” is.
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28 comments
I feel like the trend of elevating common terms to proper nouns reached a sort of apogee with”The Dissident Right”. I remember “The Alternative Right” drew similar criticism back in the as being too non-descript. However, you could argue that “alternative”, while an innocuous word in and of itself, isn’t commonly used as an attribute for a political faction, which makes “Alternative Right” enough of a novel language construct to serve some functionality as a proper name. otoh, “dissident”, “right wing dissident”, and “dissident right” have been used for decades, and I’d wager are the first terms that come to mind for almost everyone when thinking of anything that fits the definition in one way or another. Any right, that’s, well, dissident from the mainstream.
Author is completely delusional these people still enjoy 10s of millions of dollars a month on Patreon
According to Patreon, they make $178K a month. Protip: Don’t call others “completely delusional” and then pull a completely delusional number out of your ass.
If you took all the Dirtbag Left content creators combined, it might crack a million a month but definitely not tens of million.
Iron Guard might be thinking of the Breadtube community (Hasan Piker, Vaush, Counterpoints) which is a different albeit adjacent scene.
If you include those guys, the total goes up a lot but I was writing specifically about the blog/podcast-based Dirtbag Left scene. Commie YouTubers and live streamers are a different animal.
‘Dirtbag Left’ influencers like the Red Scare girls falling into the orbit of Bronze Age Pervert has absolutely no benefit to white people. Both exist to provide ideological alternatives to posing any threat to Jewish power. Neither have coherent, useful ideologies that will help anyone.
How would you distinguish between the “right” of the Dimes Square scene and the “dissident right?” I’m assuming that they don’t like the woke nonsense but still aren’t on board with the rhetoric of the dissident right namely race realism and the idea of a white ethnostate.
As an Englishman if I may add my pennyworth I would say that all this discussion, fascinating as it truly is, amounts to mere political posturing, posturing which will soon be swept aside by existential reality.
This! Feels a lot like the wider dissident right is busy talking with itself while freshly disillusioned normies are looking around for answers.
So Leftists put up more than 2 million a year to keep Chapo going on the assumption that these people stand between them and the Alt Right? Because TRS was all medium, no message? So people will be Marxists if they just have edgy podcasters to listen to? “A fool and his money,” they say. Meanwhile, our projects go wanting.
It’s actually worse than that. The $2 million a year is JUST from their Patreon. They also have a book, do live shows, collect ad revenue, etc.
One of the fundamental contradictions of Marxism is that they want a working class revolution and yet you need an above average IQ to understand Marxism. There’s all sorts of esoteric terminology and concepts (surplus value, abstract labor, false consciousness) that can be tricky to wrap your head around. So rather than a working class movement, Marxism is a movement of the college educated with a few autistic autodidacts.
But this explains why the Dirtbag Left scene is so awash in money. Their fans are fairly well-to-do.
This is my 6,000th comment at CC:
The hilarious thing is that I am sure a lot of the initial appeal was just the silly claim that they needed their version of TRS. Itchy and Scratchy, meet Worker and Parasite.
But Marxists really do believe their bullshit. So they can’t believe that the Alt-Right appeals because of the truth. Instead, the appeal must be Mike Enoch’s gravelly voice, sarcasm, memes, etc. So why not co-opt that style and format for the workers’ struggle? Then would-be Alt-Rightists will be cheering as AOC twerks in Queens instead.
Sadly for our cause, there are more, and more willing, Marxists to support such ventures than their are White Nationalists to support ours.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Greg Johnson: June 27, 2024 This is my 6,000th comment at CC
While others quit the cause, you are admired for your perseverance!
Marxists really do believe their bullshit. So they can’t believe that the Alt-Right appeals because of the truth. Instead, the appeal must be Mike Enoch’s gravelly voice, sarcasm, memes, etc. So why not co-opt that style and format for the workers’ struggle?
I’ve never identified with the failed alt-right or their half-truths, and have never heard Mike Enoch’s gravelly voice. Isn’t Enoch’s a/k/a Peinovich a Jew — and that maybe he even had a Jewess wife? That would make him doubly ineligible for NA membership if he has non-White dependents. We serious racial separatists, low in number that we are, still must draw the line somewhere, like at race for one thing.
I’ve listened to these podcasts for years, long before Trump came down the escalator with our salvation hiding in his pocket.
Michael Enoch Peinovich isn’t a Jew but he is divorced from one. She apparently did not mind his edgy Alt Right podcasts, and even participated in a comedy bit or two before their official splitsville.
Mike’s Dad was a Liberal college professor and he has a Libtard sister whose favorite book in the world is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Mike himself started out as a pro-White Leftist before moving on to Libertarianism, and then to the Alt Right and White Nationalism. Sometimes I find these Leftist and Libertarian priors grating.
But to their great credit, The Right Stuff dot biz podcasting network has not dropped Holocaust Denial ─ even though doing so would probably help their financial bottom line immensely.
🙂
I think the appeal of Marxism to the intellectual class is simply that Marx was a Jew and they want the founding guru of their world order to be such. It’s ethnic self worship over any sort of rationality. If he had not been Jewish, communism would just be another weird thing you had heard of out there, like reserve credit or whatever Pound’s thing was.
Also, it does not take a complicated discourse on Dialectical Materialism to make a good Communist.
Cultural Bolshevism is the opposite of White Power.
Modern practical Marxism isn’t really about such things as missiles paraded on Red Square anyway.
It is more about the Lesbian Communist elected to head the American Library Association, or genderqueer degenerates encouraged to socialize with people’s kids.
All you need is somethig loosely Trotskyite, or just to be radically anti-White.
🙂
Yeah, if Marx had written the “hula hoop credit manifesto,” it would have been that. All your professors would then be seen doing hula at all times to impress the Js. You could hook them all to a big battery to charge, lol.
It’s laughable to suggest that twitter is a bastion of free speech.
Alanbetts: June 27, 2024 It’s laughable to suggest that twitter is a bastion of free speech.
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Thank you, Alan. It was painful for me to skip all the way through to the concluding sentence:
Certainly on Elon Twitter/X, the Right is now undeniably where “the action” is.
I’m generally right as a race-thinker, but not “on the Right.” I have missed all the Internet action since I have never been on Twitter and never will be found on X or other social media.
I did not recognize hardly any of the names or sites mentioned in this report and don’t give a shit to hear any more about the phony alt-right vs. alt-left ruse. I believed Jason Kessler when he told us here on C-C earlier this year:
Since the original Alt Right was crushed by the government in 2017, the white [sic] identity space has been dominated by something calling itself Christian Nationalism.
All of that abortive alt-right/identity Internet bs aside, Christian nationalism vs. biological racial nationalism/separation is a real struggle. The Christian nationalists must eventually lose that one or the White race will eventually go the way of the Dodo bird. The alternative to the Jew’s controlled opposition — Christian nationalism — is Cosmotheism. Jews fear it because they can never control it or its adherents.
That was a very textured analysis of the dbag left. Yes, it was the absence of identity politics as the main political motive that made sanders so appealing to intelligent young whites, even if they didn’t grasp that at a conscious level. Ultimately, identity politics is depressing because it is anti progress in that NAM dysfunction is in reality genetic.
For some reason Sanders reminds me of Adventure Time because I was watching that show heavily during the period of his his ascendency. Strange.
I think if White nationalists are to win in the 21st century, it will be in combination with an economically leftist anti-capitalist agenda. Similarly, if the political left in Europe and America is to gain ground again, it will have to be with a culturally conservative and pro-Huwhite political programme.
I’m a populist and an economic interventionist. But even I want to vomit at rhetoric like “an economically leftist anti-capitalist agenda.”
So basically Gork and Mork.
One is brutal and cunning, the other cunning but brutal.
The BAPsphere is already better than ‘White Nationalism™.’ Accounts like Martin talk about mass deportations, mock Indians & immigrants and actually fight unapologetically for whites while White Nationalists™ whine about how Jews violate Palestinian human rights.
You’ve really lost it. Next you’ll be praising Hanania.
No, you have all lost your minds. Keith Woods has decided to burn his intellectual credibility by streaming with a la luz extinguido tier Ameriorc named ‘Sneako.’ He is one step away from dropping a rap album at this point. I see antiwhite Mohammedans retweeted constantly by White Nationalists™. You have all turned into some perverse mirror image of neocons; far more concerned with global human rights and conflict in the Middle East than the fate of whites in the West. And half of White Nationalists™ are even NeverTrump!
How curious that you bring up Hanania! Is there a better case against human rights for Palestinians than that one‽ Or perhaps you see his newfound love for Israel as a greater betrayal than his antiwhite open borders advocacy?
As ‘White Nationalist’ sentiments become more widely (and boldly) communicated, ‘White Nationalism’ will cease to be solely the province of right-wing thought and thinkers. There are a few paths that ‘lefists’ can use to come closer to White Nationalist sympathies. One of them is the recognition that Whites have always been a demographic minority globally. All that gave Whites their ‘edge’ in conflicts (and collaborations) with other races was our technological expertise and the technological capability that flowed from that expertise. Since Whites have shared this expertise with the world, Whites no longer ‘punch above their weight’ demographically and our minority status on the world stage has become an issue that ‘leftists’ really ought to consider important in assessing ideas like ‘white privilege’ and ‘reparations’. This is why anti-Whites have to mine history for reasons to be anti-White: In the present, Whites are a global minority besieged by a massive influx of non-Whites into our homelands.
White nationalists have tried this for decades. The National Alliance used to sell millions of stickers with pictures of whites and a call to protect this endangered species. Certainly we can reach some whites by raising the alarm about our peril, but this will never work on leftists.
Joe Sovran wrote that “Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.”
He is right. No matter how bad things get for us, even if we die out, the world that we leave behind will still be a Western, white creation. Our achievements will outlast us. We created the modern world, and we will still mock from the grave our successors.
Leftists need not dig far for reasons to hate us. All of history since the end of the Middle Ages is the white man mogging the rest of the world. Were we far kinder than any other group would have been in our place? Certainly, but leftists hate whites for their superiority, not cruelty. ‘Whites as endangered indigenous tribe’ will never sell, and only drags us down to the same level as the thirdworld hordes.
We should stop trying to find gaps in leftist, human rights morality to justify our own existence, and flip the board. Don’t try to work with leftist morality, refuse it entirely!
James Tucker: June 29, 2024 The National Alliance used to sell millions of stickers with pictures of whites [sic] and a call to protect this endangered species. Certainly we can reach some whites [sic] by raising the alarm about our peril, but this will never work on leftists.
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Our Alliance still offers the effective “Earth’s Most Endangered Species — Help Preserve it” sticker. It never had pictures of Whites on it. Find that and around 50 other free stickers and fliers on our “Free National Alliance Fliers / Graphics” at natall.com. Check ’em out.
The NA message is only for fellow Whites, even former liberals. Some of NA’s best members have been former Jeffersonian-type liberals, not “Leftists” as that term has come to be defined as Marxists.
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We should stop trying to find gaps in leftist, human rights morality to justify our own existence, and flip the board. Don’t try to work with leftist morality, refuse it entirely!
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What fools are trying to do that? If the Alliance’s simple non-controversial message of “Love Your Race” appeals to a newly racially responsible liberal, that’s good. Jews and other racially enemies will call that positive message “hate.”
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