890 words

Keith Woods makes an “elevator pitch” to a billionaire to put his money behind white survival. From the Counter-Currents Spring Retreat in Rome.

Please share far and wide, especially with the billionaire next door.

Also available on X.

Every political system reflects the people trained to run it. Journalists, policymakers, academics—these are not neutral actors. They are produced by institutions that select for certain assumptions and reinforce them over time.As people on the right, we should believe in the power of elites, of talented high agency people to shape the world.

So the first priority is elite formation. Not campaigns or short-term advocacy—people. Scholarships, fellowships, academies that identify capable individuals early, train them, and place them into positions of influence. If you want different outcomes, you need different people making decisions. That only happens if you build a pipeline that compounds over time.

We’ve already seen what happens when ideas spread effectively. Over the past few years, nationalist positions that were once marginal have moved into the mainstream of right-wing politics. An article in the New Yorker last week titled “How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics” featured a concerned liberal journalist reporting that most of the Zoomers in the Republican Party now hold views like ours. Rod Dreher reported in a post recently that his impression of visiting DC was that about 70% of young GOP activists are what he classified as groypers.

That shift didn’t come primarily through institutions—it came through media, it came because the spread of social media meant suddenly voices like Greg Johnson and Jared Taylor could be heard by millions. Our ideas happen to be correct, which means they are far more “sticky” once we are able to get them out there, and now they dominate right-wing thought among young people.

But that success has exposed a gap.

The ideas have spread faster than the infrastructure needed to sustain them. Much of the current ecosystem is still informal, fragmented, and driven by short-term incentives—what you might call “slopulism,” where creators chase engagement through payouts, superchats, and algorithmic visibility. Even today, I saw many nationalist creators throwing a tantrum on my X timeline because of a change announced in the X payouts structure. I myself have seen voices who I respected, who were putting out edifying, interesting content become, for lack of a better term “slop merchants” to boost their bi-monthly X payout as much as possible. As much as our movement has grown its influence, the general lowering of the tone and lack of thoughtful content that has led to has alienated many bright, intellectually minded people — sometimes the bad really does drive out the good.

That is why serious funding matters. If you want a higher calibre of people, you have to make it possible for them to operate independently of these incentives. You need to pay people well enough that they are not forced to tailor everything to the algorithm, not forced to prostitute their judgment for superchats, not forced to turn every insight into a cheap dopamine hit for an audience. Funding creates the conditions for seriousness. It allows talented people to think long-term, to develop expertise, to produce work that is measured rather than frantic, and to build institutions rather than personal brands. In other words, it helps create a vanguard: people who are not being jerked around by the appetites of the crowd, but are capable of leading, educating, and shaping the direction of the movement with discipline.

And if we want our ideas to spread and influence the maximum number of people possible, media infrastructure is also decisive.

Established conservative media already understands the importance of professionalism. They invest in studios, trained presenters, on-the-ground reporting, editing, and consistent output. That level of production doesn’t just improve quality—it signals legitimacy. It tells audiences, and the wider system, that these are serious actors operating at scale.

If nationalist ideas are going to move from influence to dominance, that standard has to be matched and exceeded. It is not enough to have the right analysis if it is delivered in an amateur format. You need institutions that look and function like institutions—news hubs, podcast networks, correspondents, production teams. A system that can produce high-quality content consistently, across platforms, and at volume.

There is a clear precedent for this kind of long-term investment. Libertarianism began as a marginal intellectual current, but with sustained elite funding it built institutions—think tanks, academic programs, publications—that trained people and gave them platforms. Over time, its ideas filtered outward into mainstream policy and media. The result was not immediate political control or revolution, but a lasting shift in political opinions that came from a small organised political elite punching well above their weight.

That is the model for nationalism. Sometimes, people feel like we are making little progress. Whenever I give a pitch like this, I point to the many leftist NGO’s you can think of, each staffed with dozens of employees paid tens of thousands per year. Compare the impact of any of those individual people, and it’s negligible compared to the impact of individual nationalist influencers, authors and content creators you can think of.

There is still incredible potential in this movement, and an incredible opportunity for anyone that wants to be a part of it.