A New Direction

With a heavy heart I’ve decided to kill Alt Right 2.0.

Though perhaps “abort” is the better word. We’re still in the first trimester, so it doesn’t feel terribly significant. Still, I held out for some time, and it took a lot of prodding from my autistic big brother and gay uncle before I listened to reason.

Ultimately my drive to rebuild the Alt Right was driven by nostalgia. And not “old commercials on YouTube” nostalgia—I mean the sort of deep existential longing that makes you a little solipsistic and can seriously distort your judgment.

The AR of 2015-2016 was quite simply my Woodstock. It was the subculture where I self-actualized and came of age, where I made the best friend I ever had, where I met my first love, and where I was treated as a leader for the first time in my life. The Alt Right brand will therefore always connote glory and greatness to me.

But I’ve realized this is a luxury of only having been an eceleb during the Fun Times. Every major AR figure who stuck around into 2017-2018 got burned pretty badly—by antifa, by the media, by each other, and not infrequently by themselves during moments of extreme duress and public scrutiny. Most of them have since worked hard to move past those dark days and create something positive for themselves, and the last thing they want is to align themselves with anything “Alt Right”—especially from the Disney guy who dropped off the face of the earth just before things went sour.

My hope was to rehabilitate the brand by making enough of an impact that the public would increasingly associate it with my work and now-mainstream positions. And I honestly think I could have achieved this.

But why bother? This would require me to spend years explaining to people how I’m ackshully not a WN anymore, when instead I could just not do that. It would look very bizarre to spend money and energy and political capital advancing a *brand* instead of anything substantial, and nobody focused on results would sign on to that.

The last thing I want is to act like a Boomer who’s always going to Woodstock revivals and won’t let the 60s die. And for that reason I’m closing the door on the Alt Right.

But I’m not *slamming* the door. I want to leave it slightly ajar, if only to acknowledge my past and pay respect to where I come from.

That’s why I’m rebranding to The Walt Right.

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The Walt Right isn’t a “movement”, and I don’t want to be a “leader” like Spencer was in 2016. I’m not temperamentally suited to lead a movement, and despise the kind of consensus building and ego management required by something like that.

Instead I want to create a parallel world.

I want to build an earnest and exuberant space for contrarians, dissidents, and free thinkers in the Republican coalition who are committed to building a serious technocratic vision for the future.

I want to nurture a creative scene for right-leaning people to share intellectually sophisticated art and music and satire.

I want to create a forum where I can talk to people of diverse and unconventional backgrounds, and get exposed to ideas / perspectives I’d never otherwise encounter. I want to curate and amplify such voices so rightism benefits from their insights.

I’m not sure where this journey will take me. But I definitely need room to pivot and adapt as necessary (which is a big reason why Hanania has been so successful), and you can’t really do that if you’re leading a movement. It makes you look weird and inconsistent. With a movement you need to channel an emergent consensus toward a distinct goal and march fanatically towards that goal. There is obviously no mood for this currently on the intellectual right. Right now people want to explore and theorycraft and debate internally, and I wholeheartedly endorse that impulse.

Creating this kind of intellectually open climate is the best way to build right wing human capital. This is what we need, not a “movement”. And looking back, what I described in Alt Right 2.0 was more of a scene than a movement anyway.

So with this realization I’d like to thank you all for sticking with me through the past month’s rebrands. I look forward to building this world with you all, and expect us to accomplish some fantastic things over the next year.

Welcome to The Walt Right.