Alt-Right 2.0 Is a Terrible Idea

Count me out.

Alt-Right 2.0 sounds like a terrible idea.

Let’s run through the reasons why the original Alt-Right collapsed and why the contrarians who want to bring it back are acting on an impulse in search of an ideology.

1. Attention Seeking – I had a front row seat to the collapse of Alt-Right 1.0. I have also had years to reflect on our mistakes. A big part of the reason why the Alt-Right collapsed in 2017/2018 was the Richard Spencer College Tour which in retrospect was about nothing but self promotion. The big idea here was to fill the void left behind by the implosion of MILO by leapfrogging from campus to campus to stir up a ruckus so that we could play free speech victims in the media and sue universities.

Richard Spencer came to Auburn in 2017, not to persuade anyone here of anything, but to launch into a diatribe about sportsball at an SEC school. It ended with his supporters getting chased off of campus that night. There were several fights with Antifa and students. A friend of mine went to jail that night. The same thing happened at the University of Florida and Michigan State. Spencer responded to the disruption by announcing to the world that “Antifa is winning” and by blaming his supporters.

As a tactic, it was expensive and divisive. It demoralized the movement while strengthening the opposition. It hurt people who supported the movement who were either doxxed and lost their jobs or who were arrested or who came away from it with medical bills. At least two people who attended the University of Florida event went to prison. Cameron Padgett, who booked these events for Spencer, was countersued and committed suicide after sinking into debt and relapsing into drug abuse.

Does anyone even remember anything profound that Spencer said in his speeches at these events? No, the point was simply to get his name in newspapers. He wanted to be famous. That was it. Vanity was the core of this ill conceived project which brought down the movement.

2. Personnel Decisions – There is a reason why I chose to include Evan McLaren in the featured image of this article. In the Alt-Right 1.0 days, McLaren was the executive director of NPI and Richard Spencer’s handpicked right hand man before he became a shitlib turncoat and handed over all the personal information of everyone who had been associated with NPI to his Antifa friends on Twitter. You can find him on there these days groveling to those people and raging against the Right.

Disloyalty reigned at the top level in Alt-Right institutions. Why would anyone be foolish enough to trust those people and go down the same road with them again?

3. Cultivating Liberal Journos – Richard Spencer had a bizarre obsession with cultivating liberal journalists like Elle Reeve and Rosie Gray. This led to fiasco after fiasco that steadily deflated and winnowed the movement: Heilgate, Charlottesville III when Spencer returned to Charlottesville with a CNN camera crew after the Unite the Right rally, the New York Times expose of Eli Mosley’s stolen valor, etc.

The coda to Alt-Right 1.0 was the interview that Spencer gave to Elle Reeve during the Charlottesville trial when even she appeared to be baffled by his lack concern for the well being of the people who came to his events. “It should have just been about Richard Spencer” summed up the whole era.

Literally no one was attracted to the movement because Spencer was reaching converts on CNN or constantly sucking up to liberal reporters from The Atlantic, BuzzFeed or VICE News.

4. Playing the Villain – As the public face of the Alt-Right, Richard Spencer played the role of a Bond villain for the media. The punch in the face at the Trump inauguration gave Antifa a big boost. The video that he released in which he complained that “Antifa is winning” gave them another big boost. He was caught on tape screaming “I rule the world” in a meltdown after Charlottesville. This is the same person who later came to the Sines v. Kessler trial with a stuffed animal for emotional support.

5. Burning Bridges – As Keith Woods once quipped, Richard Spencer has a lost a hundred friends and burned a thousand bridges and none of them are his fault. It would be a cheap shot to point to how his marriage ended or his breakup with Megan Bobonick, but it is all part of the same pattern. He simply had no talent in leadership or management and burned through his relationships. Political success requires doing exactly the opposite. No wonder the Alt-Right fragmented and collapsed.

6. Scorned Women – At the height of Alt-Right 1.0, I was puzzled about why Spencer lived in Alexandria, VA and his wife lived in Whitefish, MT with his kids. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he was screwing around with groupies like Samantha Froelich who testified against him in the Sines v. Kessler trial or running around with Megan Bobonick who was some kind of academic researcher. This is just one of many examples that come to mind of the moral void that brought down the movement.

7. AltRight.com – There was no bigger nerd in the Alt-Right with delusions of grandeur than Jason Jorjani who created AltRight.com with Spencer. It was all part of Jorjani’s master plan in which he would be installed as the leader of the Alt Right and play a central role in the restoration of the Persian Empire and the de-Islamization of Iran. This was supposed to be funded by a mysterious figure known only as “X” through “a multi-billion dollar black budget for a classified project to be implemented by the Trump Administration.” It all fell apart when the promised funds never materialized.

8. Negative Definitions – The Alt-Right defined itself as a big tent space outside the pre-Trump Conservatism, Inc. consensus. It was originally a space where White Nationalists rubbed shoulders with paleoconservatives and libertarians in the George W. Bush era. It was conceived as a means for White Nationalists to reach a larger audience. If there was anything of substance at the core of the original Alt-Right, it was White Nationalism or what Richard Spencer called Identitarianism.

In 2024, the contrarians who want to give “Alt-Right 2.0” a whirl have abandoned White Nationalism and Identitarianism. Paleoconservatism is ascendant. Reactionaries are influential. Libertarians have a voice in Congress. White identity politics is increasingly mainstream meat and potatoes discourse on the Right. National Socialists remain as marginalized as ever. There is no longer any ossified conservative establishment to challenge like the tottering dinosaur that was Reaganism in 2012.

By defining itself in purely negative terms against True Conservatism, the incoherent Alt-Right was always destined to disintegrate once those people were toppled from power. There is no need for an Alt-Right or Dissident Right when White identity politics is simply the Online Right in 2024.

9. Pseudo-Intellectuals, Dandies and Dilettantes – Far from offering “intellectual seriousness,” Alt-Right 1.0 is remarkable for producing virtually nothing of intellectual substance, and particularly Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers. The lowbrow popular version of the Alt-Right on 4chan, YouTube, Daily Stormer and TRS was even less intellectual.

Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis did all the heavy lifting in fleshing out a nationalist vision and political agenda. Jared Taylor and the race realists like J. Philippe Rushton were around long before the Alt-Right. Identitarianism was borrowed from the European New Right. Peter Brimelow and VDARE had been pushing for immigration restriction since the 1990s. Even the accelerationist mass shooters were inspired by James Mason’s SIEGE. Spencer gestured at vague Nietzschean platitudes.

10. The Lowbrow Alt-Right – In its heyday, Alt-Right 1.0 was known for Nazi toilet humor, gas chamber memes, trolling journos on Twitter, sonnenrads, Kekistan flags and parody songs, not original groundbreaking ideas. When this culture came offline into the real world, it produced gladiators like Based Stick Man. Ten years later, most people who were amused by that have matured. It looks juvenile and ephemeral to grown men who are now in their late thirties and forties.

Is it all Richard Spencer’s fault?

No, he is simply a rich target. He also isn’t wrong about a lot of things.

11. Incels – In Spencer’s view, he was slumming with losers and ankle biters – low status White men who are incapable of attracting women – who brought him down in Charlottesville and pushed him aside in its wake. He tried to lead those people. He more or less jumped in front of the crowd and tried to ride the wave in an effort to become famous. There is a kernel of truth to this.

While Richard Spencer had created the original Alternative Right website, he quickly lost interest in the project and had a bitter falling out with his colleagues. He ditched the Alternative Right in favor of Radix Journal and hosting NPI conferences. The true social base of the 2015/2016 Alt-Right emerged out of Gamergate and was centered on 4chan and cultivated by Daily Stormer and TRS.

There really was a coup against Spencer after Charlottesville that was led by angry manlet types like Weev, Beardson Beardly, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Anglin. Those people also took over the main body of the movement in 2018 and increasingly defined it in terms of their resentments about women. Weev would post psychotic rants about his desire to beat and rape women. Andrew Anglin spent years celebrating Elliot Rodger. Fuentes would come on his show and talk about burning women at the stake.

In retrospect, why would anyone want to go down the same road again in light of how it turned out? This is another reason why we don’t need an Alt-Right 2.0. At a time when White identity politics is increasingly mainstream, why would you want to attract legions of bitter, marginal, sexually frustrated losers? Spencer is correct that to a large degree this is what the movement always was.

12. Censorship – Alt-Right 1.0 rose and fell with the tides of social media censorship on Twitter and YouTube. As with the pre-Trump conservative establishment, the conditions which facilitated the rise of the original movement no longer exist. It is a different world now.

13. Third Reich Nostalgia – I’m tired of rebrands.

White Nationalism was a rebrand. The Alt-Right was a rebrand. Identitarianism was a rebrand. The Dissident Right was a rebrand. As the TRS / NJP saga shows, no list of why Alt-Right 1.0 failed would be complete without bringing up the cycle of how the movement always returns to its origins of George Lincoln Rockwell trolling the normies on a street corner.  

The movement is like an alcoholic. After a major failure or collapse, it will sober up, rebrand and promise to be a new me. A new guy will come along who will promise good optics and success in mainstream politics. A few years later, the same guy will be throwing up Roman salutes or praising Hitler. Everyone in the organization will turn on everyone else. See NJP and America First.

14. Antisocial Personality Types – I can already hear it now.

Sure, White identity politics is increasingly mainstream. The taboo on criticizing Israel is beginning to erode. Immigration restriction couldn’t be more mainstream. Nationalism is no longer the preserve of edgelords. Pretty much everything we used to say we wanted has gained traction.

But … CHRISTIANITY IS A JEWISH PLOT.

For lots of people who were involved in Alt-Right 1.0, the marginalization was the point. Being a fringe edgelord was their whole reason for getting involved in the scene in the first place. Political success and normalization is by definition the worst possible outcome for these types. They were in it to shock the normies or for the contrarian hot takes. They enjoyed being outrageous.

15. Contrarians – This brings me to the contrarians who want an Alt-Right 2.0.

These people have an itch to scratch. They are driven by an impulse, not an ideology. When neocons were the conservative establishment, they were for White Nationalism, HBD, populism, anti-globalism, immigration restriction and so on. But today, they have rejected White Nationalism and HBD and want free trade, mass immigration, a neocon foreign policy to weaken Russia, etc.

The same people who were marching through Charlottesville with tiki torches and beating the drum of Identitarianism a few years ago have become accounts like this Twitter:

I don’t know about you.

I’m too old for this though.

My two sons are Generation Alpha.

I want them to grow up in a world where pro-White politics has been normalized. Winning metapolitical battles on the Right also isn’t enough. It is a small consolation prize. The ship is still sinking even if some conservatives are grudgingly coming around to our point of view.

We can’t afford to spend another decade goofing off and shooting ourselves in the foot. Trolling epileptic libs with strobe lights on Twitter is great for giggles, but we have work to do.