All Grown Up

Alt-Right 2.0 is a terrible idea.

I look back on that era like a bad picture in a high school yearbook.

In a lot of ways, I haven’t changed at all. I am still a stridently antiwar isolationist. I am still concerned about mass immigration and demographic change. I am still an anti-globalist. I am still a race realist. I am still a nationalist. I am still very much concerned about our religious and cultural decline. I still want to mainstream White identity politics. I still write about the Jewish Question.

I went to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville because I was a Southern nationalist who supported Confederate monuments. Today, I am excited about the fact that the idea of a National Divorce has gone mainstream. I still love my Southern heritage. I still support Confederate monuments. I still associate with all the same people. I have the same friends. I still go to the same conferences.

I feel older, more mature and experienced now. I am a Christian family man in the prime of my life. I can barely find the time to maintain this website because I have so many more responsibilities. I have discarded some ideas and tactics that I entertained in the past. Experience has shown that we don’t need to organize big rallies and expose ourselves to unnecessary risks to erode taboos. The Overton Window has been shattered since we stopped holding the rallies and the Alt-Right crumbled.

Looking back on it, the Alt-Right was anti-intellectual. It didn’t contribute anything like new groundbreaking ideas. Instead, it was highly successful at creating an online culture that took a bunch of older ideas from various sources – paleoconservatism, White Nationalism, libertarianism – and popularized those ideas and permanently reshaped the culture of the young online Right. Many of the leaders of the original Alt-Right like Richard Spencer have been pushed aside and devoured by their followers, but that online culture survived Charlottesville and is now more influential than ever.

Turning Point USA and Daily Wire are useful barometers here. The Alt-Right / Dissident Right and Turning Point were still distinct at the time of the Groyper War in 2019. By 2024 though, Charlie Kirk had come around to slamming church leaders as cucks, criticizing MLK on MLK Day, warning his followers that the Great Replacement is happening. Matt Walsh has taken over meat and potatoes culture war and White grievance politics content. Candace Owens was fired for being too critical of Israel. It has become increasingly hard to tell the difference between “mainstream” and “dissident” accounts.

The Alt-Right used to be the space on the Right that was outside the ossified Reaganite “True Conservatism” consensus of Conservatism, Inc. Mitt Romney was the last Center Right Republican presidential nominee. The Center Right used to be the dominant faction in the Republican coalition. The Populist Right was the junior partner. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election tipped the balance. In 2024, the Populist Right is now the overwhelming dominant force in the Republican coalition while the Center Right has become the hugely diminished junior partner. The 2024 Republican primary showed what Republican voters think of Mike Pence and Nikki Haley and their brand of “conservative principles.”

If we are being honest, it would be more accurate to say that Liz Cheney and David French are the “Dissident Right” in 2024 and it is people with our views who are the establishment. This is why the contrarians and edgelords who used to identify with the Alt-Right can now be found promoting liberalism and attacking HBD and supporting a neocon foreign policy and mass immigration. We’re on opposite sides now because those of us who are satisfied with this shift aren’t interested in lobbing grenades.

After Charlottesville, the Alt-Right disintegrated and retreated to the internet. The organized movement fragmented into small cliques and cults of personality. Tucker Carlson’s show filled the void. Carlson cleaned up and repackaged a lot of the rhetoric and grievances and used his platform to inject it into mainstream politics. Subsequent events like COVID, the trans craze, the George Floyd riots, Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and especially the Biden administration radicalized millions of conservatives. Many of these people have adopted the positions of this more sanitized version of the Alt-Right.

As I said before, the Alt-Right in its heyday was known for Nazi toilet humor, gas chamber memes, trolling journos on Twitter, sonnenrads, Pepe the Frog, anime, Kekistan flags and parody songs. Many of the leaders were atheists or Nietzscheans with an axe to grind against Christianity. Thankfully, those days are over and the ceiling is much higher now. We got rid of those people and their baggage. In 2024, you don’t have to engage with those types anymore if you support reasonable political positions. Virtually everyone on the Right, for example, is alarmed by our immigration policy and wants closed borders.

The wild, punk rock “vanguard” phase of the early Alt-Right is over. The online culture that the insurgency spawned has shed a lot of its original fringier skin while remaining true to its core values and positions. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the hippie to yuppie transition. It was a necessary step for the counterculture to become our mainstream culture. Some people were incapable of making the leap.

What’s next?

We haven’t really won at anything yet: Confederate monuments came down, the internet was censored, the borders were opened, the culture got woke, an entire generation was fagged up and transed, military bases were renamed, another huge war was started with Russia, and so on. The only thing that has really changed is that we are winning the metapolitical battle on the Right. Things have just gotten so bad under Joe Biden that millions of conservatives have grudgingly started to come around.

VDARE has completely won the argument over immigration on the Right, but is being shut down by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Immigration levels have never been worse. In a nutshell, this is where we are at in 2024. We’re stuck on a sinking ship, but we at least have the smug satisfaction of being able to tell other people “I told you so.” Few people were listening to us until three or four years ago.

Finally, we might have the heft and consensus necessary to chart a different course. It has been a long, long road just to get here and it will be a much longer road to get to where we need to go. Populism is no longer premature. We are in desperate need of better political representation. I expect this transition from metapolitics to ordinary politics will dominate the next decade.