Growing Oldhead Gracefully

1,251 words ^[1]

If you are reading Counter-Currents, chances are that you are an oldhead. For one, Counter-Currents has been around a long time during which time it has accumulated longtime followers. Also it tends to be somewhat “advanced” white nationalism. Some of the articles about esoteric fascist philosophers may not be best suited to beginners. So even if you are a new Counter-Currents regular, there is still a high probability that you’ve been around “the scene” before coming here. In other words, you are probably an oldhead.

I want you to look at this picture has been making the rounds, but look at it as an oldhead.

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It is from a party of young right-wingers in New York. The two things stand out about this picture.

First, the picture is not just very white but ostentatiously gentile. Second, you notice that these ain’t your daddy’s Republicans. These Republicans are sexier and an order of magnitude more fond of Hitler jokes than their parents’ generation of Republicans. No one in the crowd even remotely resembles Alex P. Keaton and there is not a token black in sight. This picture symbolizes the death of the old guard as the new generation of based and redpilled youth have stormed the palace. It is one hell of a picture. Whoever took it deserves an award. It captures a certain energy and you almost feel like you are there in the room with them.

Leftists like to say that fascism is the anesthetization of politics and indeed, the fact that the picture is so aesthetically pleasing does give it an implicitly fascist vibe. The people in the above picture are not merely “not your daddy’s Republicans” but also not your daddy’s Dissident Rightists.  We are now very far away from the like of oddballs like Chris Cantwell, Matt Heimbach, and Patrick Little. The people in this picture look normal, possibly even neurotypical. Dare I say, have we succeeded in redpilling the normies?

Now, I don’t want to get into a debate whether these people are truly /OurGuys/ or whether they NRx, groypers, normie MAGA, or whatever. I think in the Elon era, these factional distinctions matter a lot more to content creators than content consumers who tend to see it all as one thing. Content creators get into factionalism because they have to sell you on why you should listen to them rather than the other guy but I think the average right-wing content consumer on X sees nothing wrong with whoever they think makes good tweets and probably couldn’t tell you which faction each person belonged to. It’s normal to go to people’s Twitter pages and see them retweeting guys from all over the right. The point is that the people in the picture are the product of right-wing internet and so I claim them.

Looking at this picture as an oldhead, you can feel a range of emotions. Of course, you could feel jealousy at their youth and the fact that there weren’t any cool Hitler joke parties with hot women at them when you were their age. Another emotion you might feel is resentment. The old heads spent years laying of the intellectual groundwork and refining many of the arguments that ultimately discredited the neocon’s intellectual class. It was the Alt Right that made being right-wing cool. Do the people in this picture have any conception of how many lives were destroyed in the process of pushing Dissident Right ideas into the national conversation, ideas which they repeat with no idea where they originated? And yet Greg Johnson, Mike Enoch, and Kevin MacDonald are not invited to the party.

I can understand some slight annoyance that the early adopters, the people who sacrificed the most, are not the primary beneficiaries of their labor. We oldheads are like black 1950s rock pioneers watching suburban white kids get rich ripping us off.

However, my feelings looking at this picture are those of satisfaction. For me, redpilling the normies was the whole point and in doing so, there is some vindication in proving that you weren’t crazy to believe what you did because here are some normal people who also believe it. Or at least, is proves that you don’t have to be crazy. I have never claimed to sane.

But to the oldhead, the victory is bittersweet. “The movement” will never again be what it once was, which was a ragtag band of bohemian eccentrics, autistic political theory nerds, and rebels with more than few sociopaths sprinkled in for seasoning. It will gradually professionalize and in the process may be less fun. What was once punk rock become mainstream pop. As the Overton Window shifts, the danger declines and if we are being honest, the danger was always kind of part of the thrill. White nationalism was riding the tiger: you either ride white nationalism to victory or the tiger eats you. But at last, Elon Musk has put the tiger to rest. I think DOGE employee Marko Elez getting rehired after it was discovered he made racist statements is a historical event of Rosa Parks magnitude. The last of Con Inc’s gatekeeping machinery has broken down.

There is also some bittersweetness in passing the baton to the new generation of pro-whites. While it is good that they will never know the levels of persecution pro-whites experienced in the past, in some ways they will be worse off for it. When white nationalists were on YouTube, they had to learn to make their arguments as politely as possible and there was a lot of value in learning to do that. The new generation will never know what it is like to be one word away from losing your channel. Back in the day, people had to use all sorts of codes like “you know who’s” instead of Jews and whatnot.

It’s something of a contradiction. On one hand, the persecution and censorship white nationalists faced in the past was something I fought to end and yet part of me finds it lamentable that future generations of whites will never have that kind of activist boot camp because it did force us to be smarter activists.

But there is also some relief in allowing the new generation take the lead. Activists tend to burn out after a certain amount of time. Even the ones who don’t get blackpilled get tired of talking about race all the time and might want to make more content about their other interests. The movement needs a constant inflow of new people to bring that missionary zeal of the newly converted. Remember when you had that? Back when you were first redpilled and were ready to take over the world? If you’re an oldhead, you probably haven’t felt that way in a while, but we need people who do. Also, oldheads can be overly cautious. We’ve known defeat too many times and it can make us conservative. Sometimes we don’t realize when the Overton Window has shifted. So there is some benefit to having some young people around to charge the machine gun nest because they don’t know not to.

The mission of the Alt Right was to take ideas that were fringe and push them into the mainstream and perhaps it took a certain type of person to do that, particularly one with a high tolerance for social disapproval. Now that this mission has been largely completed, it may require a different type of person to take it to the next level higher.