Walt Bismarck: Hunter Wallace Is Wrong

It will suffice to say here that I recall things differently.

The Alt-Right that I remember first emerged in the 2000s when George W. Bush was president and “True Conservatism” was still ascendant. The Center Right was dominant. National Review and The Weekly Standard defined and policed the boundaries of mainstream conservatism.

In those days, paleocons, libertarians and White Nationalists were in the political wilderness and huddled together for warmth on online forums like the one that I created. The nascent Alt-Right was young people – late Gen Xers / early Millennials – who disliked George W. Bush, neocons and the Iraq War. Paul Gottfried labeled us the “post-paleo Right” and later coined the term Alternative Right.

Richard Spencer who is one of my peers was deeply involved in this milieu. He started out at The American Conservative and Takimag before publicly coming out as a White Nationalist. I’m old enough to remember the movement before Spencer and before it really had a name. I remember when Spencer first launched the original Alternative Right website. I remember Richard Hanania when he was still Richard Hoste, when Greg Johnson started Counter-Currents, when Lawrence Auster was still alive, etc. I knew people like Thomas777, Fisted by Foucault, BAP and so on twenty years ago.

The second phase of the movement began in Barack Obama’s second term after Richard Spencer got bored and shitcanned the original Alternative Right website to launch his Radix Journal webzine and hold NPI conferences. This was Andrew Anglin founding The Daily Stormer, Mike Enoch & Co. launching the TRS podcast, MILO and Gamergate and the shortened “Alt Right” gestating on 4chan before erupting on YouTube and Twitter in 2015 with the #cuckservative hashtag. Spencer had little to do with any of this. He always had trouble relating to these people who swelled the base of the movement. Spencer never played video games or posted on 4chan or had any interest in anime.

From the start, Daily Stormer and TRS began to redefine the Alt-Right in their own image. This was initially highly controversial. Nazi toilet humor and swastikas were back in fashion. Vulgarity was back in fashion. Racial epithets were back in fashion. It was the age of trolling, Kekistan flags, Happy Merchant memes, parody songs, sonnenrads, Pepe the Frog, anime, etc. Everything was also a big ironic joke. Crudity was the norm. It reached a fever pitch the Stormer Nazi Troll Army on Twitter during the 2016 election. “Ironic Nazism,” which originally had been associated with White Nationalism 1.0 and which sites like Stormfront had tried to get away from, was grafted on and associated with the “Alt-Right” brand after 2014.

I will grant that there were legions of people who were attracted to the 2015-2017 Alt-Right who were contrarians, rightwing edgelords, nihilists who were enjoying the vibe or who were just trolling. Perhaps some of them were nerds and hipsters from liberal families in coastal metros who saw Spencer on CNN or who genuinely thought what he was saying about Nietzsche was brilliant and original. Walt Bismarck was 23 around 2016 which means he was around 10-years-old when the movement started.

I would place myself in the True Believers category. I am not a contrarian by temperament. I have fixed values and beliefs. I have always had the same ambitions. I am not someone who lobs grenades or who enjoys poking holes in a consensus for the sake of doing so. I am part of an older group of nationalists who disliked George W. Bush era conservatism and who supported Trump as a means to get rid of it. This is why we used to be associated with Spencer and why we now find him so tiresome. We find the contrarianism and the hot takes of the late Spencer (i.e., “Joe Biden is the best president of my lifetime”) or the Nietzschean neoliberal memes of Emmanuel Macron with glowing eyes absurd.

In my original article, I pointed to this account as a good example of what the contrarians around Richard Spencer have become since around 2021. For people like this, the marginalization of the Alt-Right was the point. It is what attracted them in the first place and why they jumped ship.

Spencer has a small cult following of people like this on Twitter who uncritically absorb, parrot and reflect his latest contrarian hot takes. It is led by Mark Brahmin who is the high priest of Apolloism which is his own personal made up religion. It strikes me as a road to nowhere.

From what I understand, this is what Walt Bismarck is driving at for Alt-Right 2.0 or now the Walt Right. He has abandoned White Nationalism and Identitarianism. He wants to bleed Russia dry by supporting the war in Ukraine in order to import cheap labor for middle class families. As he has said, he wants to appeal to urban coastal elites, and he wants to be called a fag by MAGA chuds in pickup trucks. The goal here is to charm the Morning Joe audience, own the chuds and seize power in 2028 after the post-Trump Right realizes it wants to be ruled by technocratic nerds in the Acela Corridor.

Richard Hanania’s presence on Twitter and Substack appears to be the model. Hanania has attributed his conversion to neoliberalism to reading the Jewish economist Bryan Caplan’s book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. He recently told us that he used to be cringe in his Alt-Right years as Richard Hoste, but fortunately those days are over. I lost track of him after I muted him on Twitter. He seemed to be caught in the same downward spiral of attention seeking hot takes.

In hindsight, I had such knee jerk reaction to Walt reviving the Alt-Right label for three reasons.

1. The first reason is that what is being proposed here is not at all what the original Alt-Right was about. It sounds more like something you would hear from Mitch McConnell.

2. The second reason is that we really haven’t achieved any of our original goals: the border is more porous than ever, White people are more demonized than ever, demographic change is accelerating, the culture is more degenerate, the law is less reliable than ever, and so on.

3. The third and most important reason is the trail of destruction left behind by people like Spencer and McLaren: the suicides, the doxxing, the social ostracization, the crippling lawsuits, the brand in tatters, all the people who got into fights and went to prison, etc. I understand that Richard wanted to become famous and believes “it should all just been about Richard Spencer.”

I heard Walt say something to the effect of “follow my contrarian temperament.” It brought to mind all the people who followed Spencer and how badly it ended for them. He said the Alt-Right was intellectually serious. I thought … it was reprints of Sam Francis books, Nietzschean platitudes, a think tank which didn’t think or offer anything new except doxxing the people who were interested in it, dilettantes who didn’t write white papers or policy proposals which would have required actual work. It was Happy Merchant and gas chamber memes. It was calling people cuckservatives on Twitter in their mentions. It was Spencer representing himself pro se in the Sines v. Kessler trial because he couldn’t afford a lawyer while clinging to a stuffed animal for emotional support. It was Andrew Anglin’s tantrums about women. It was Matt Forney being chased around the RNC. It was MILO bathing in blood, dressing in drag and getting diddled by his black husband. It was Jazzhands doing deep dives about Finkelthink. It was Baked Alaska and Loulz harassing gas station clerks for clicks. It was Cantwell crying on the VICE documentary. It was the day that Matt Heimbach was caught having a sordid affair with Matt Parrott’s wife. It was Nick Fuentes praising Hitler on Alex Jones with Yedolf in a gimp mask praising when he was running for president.

Walt remembers an Alt-Right where everyone was 6 foot tall except for Beardson and making three figures. It was intellectually serious. It attracted highly educated people on 4chan and 8chan. Unlike previous iterations of White Nationalism, it was articulate and sophisticated.