From 2015 to 2018 I was known as Walt Bismarck in the white nationalist internet community that called itself the Alt Right.
My claim to fame during this period was creating parody videos of Disney songs, mostly from 90s films that held nostalgic resonance with Millennials. At my peak these videos regularly accumulated hundreds of thousands of views, and a lot of people were introduced to the Alt Right through my content.
The mainstream narrative on the Alt Right has long been that the movement failed, and was swept into the dustbin of history following the fiasco at Charlottesville and subsequent marginalization of our leaders and institutions. I bought into this narrative myself for a long time. As an older and wiser man I now see that it’s bunk.
The Alt Right was wildly successful.
In 2016 we created a previously unimaginable space for once-stigmatized ideas in one of the fastest and most substantial Overton Window shifts in American history.
We intellectually colonized American conservatism, discrediting mainstream institutions and normalizing white identity politics to a degree inconceivable just a year earlier.
Today millions of MAGA boomers parrot our talking points without realizing it, while every intelligent young conservative is to some degree influenced by Alt Right ideology. This is the furthest thing from failure!
The world needs to know this story. It needs to know who we really were and the role we played in shaping contemporary American politics.
I was inspired to write this retrospective after hearing Richard Spencer reach a similar conclusion about the Alt Right’s success in a recent Twitter Space. I think going into a new election year it would be productive for some of the public figures from that era to look back on the 2016 Alt Right with a more sober mind and reflect on our experiences in greater detail.
This article is my attempt at starting that conversation.
In this piece I will first give a very personal narrative as to how I remember the Alt Right in its heyday, and explain what the movement meant to me. I will then list the goals I considered most important at the movement’s inception, and provide a detailed explanation as to why each of these goals has been successfully achieved.
Some brief notes on chronology
I think it’s useful to divide the Alt Right into four periods:
Proto Alt Right (2010 - mid 2015)
Classic Alt Right (mid 2015 - early 2016)
Peak Alt Right (mid 2016 - mid 2017)
Late Alt Right (late 2017 - 2018)
In 2018 the Alt Right as I conceive it collapsed—not because it failed, but because it had largely achieved its purpose of “redpilling the normies”.
White nationalism no longer needed a big tent intellectual vanguard to penetrate mainstream sensibilities, as our ideas had become intertwined with conventional right wing politics, and it now made more sense to separate radical theorizing from practical political action.
We had come together to elect Trump, but with him in office our disagreements became more salient, and we needed to revert to a more decentralized ecology where contrary ideas and brands could battle it out.
The Alt Right has since been partially reconstituted and rebranded as the “Dissident Right”, but I won’t be covering this extensively, as I was never part of this scene and it doesn’t seem as important or interesting to me.
The Dissident Right is probably bigger than the Alt Right ever was, but so far it’s been less impactful. While the AR drove change in the GOP, it feels like the DR is mostly in the passenger’s seat. It’s a much less virile and confident movement and more of a reactive force—Byzantium to the Alt Right’s Rome.
Far more interesting to me are the origins of the 2016 movement, which trace back to the early 2010s.
The Proto Alt Right
To best explain how the Alt Right came into being I must first describe what sort of people constituted the movement in its earliest days. This is crucial because as the AR grew it took on a life of its own, and by the time Trump won the Presidency its founding caste (hereafter the “Core Alt Right”) had been overwhelmed by the presence of an entirely different kind of person.
The rank and file of the Core Alt Right were Late Millennials, born between 1988 and 1995. As a cohort we had come of age just as progressivism began to go off the rails on college campuses. We were idealistic but consistently disappointed by the world, and deeply resentful of established institutions and authorities. We were harder working and much more intellectually rigorous than the Zoomers of today’s Dissident Right, but much less self-aware.
Meanwhile, the men who built their own platforms during the Proto Alt Right and subsequently became leaders of the movement were mostly Late Gen X. Here I’m thinking of figures like Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes, and the TRS Crew.
These were our cool older brothers. More cynical than us, a bit more laid back and epicurean, they were raised in the last days of a saner world and seemed to have a lot to teach us Millennials about how to be men—things our Boomer fathers could never properly articulate. But the Xers had their own wounds and limitations, and ultimately were more effective as solitary rebels than leaders.
The Core Alt Right was a movement of elites, and not demographically representative of the Republican Party. Most of us were highly educated (often in the humanities or some artistic discipline) and came from affluent families of professionals or academics with progressive politics. Personality-wise we were not natural conservatives, as virtually all of the Core Alt Right was very high IQ, with sky-high openness and rock-bottom agreeableness. We were smart contrarian truth-seekers.
Most of us had become politically aware in the Bush years, usually through opposition to the Iraq War and the political influence of evangelical Christianity. As teenagers many of us had been involved with New Atheism, but around the time Obama became popular there was a mass exodus from Richard Dawkins to Ron Paul, and the modal contrarian nerd of our age cohort became a hardcore libertarian. This only accelerated after the famous Elevatorgate incident in 2011, when mainstream atheism became so overwhelmed by feminism that everyone but the far left abandoned the movement.
I would estimate that a good 70-80% of the Core Alt Right passionately supported Ron Paul in 2012, and it was specifically his cartoonishly unfair treatment by the media in this cycle that radicalized our cohort and drove us to white nationalism. Remember how the DNC screwed Bernie in 2016 and that made a lot of progressive Zoomers become tankies? The same thing happened to libertarian Millennials after the GOP screwed Ron Paul in 2012. We started looking into those cranky old newsletters Lew Rockwell wrote in the 80s, got exposed to Rothbard and Hoppe and race realism, and gradually began to abandon our libertarian priors one by one.
Most of the conversations that led us down this route occurred in a decentralized and anonymous capacity on 4chan, but there were a few notable thought leaders who played a big role elsewhere. Richard Spencer was of course active during this period and gave the movement its name on AlternativeRight.com, but it would take several years for him to engage with the legions of young men who’d one day march behind him. At least from my perspective, from 2010-2013 a lot of the most influential and cutting-edge figures in this space operated primarily on YouTube.
Among the most memorable of these figures was the autistic ancap wunderkind Ryan Faulk (AKA Fringe Elements AKA The Alternative Hypothesis). Ryan is probably the man most responsible for turning me to the Alt Right; in this period he produced hundreds of hours of quality content arguing that racial IQ gaps are mostly biological and making the case against progressive dogma on a host of other issues.
Also significant was Ramzpaul, who made humorous vlogs from a more moderate nationalist boomer perspective. It was through him that I was exposed to Taki Magazine and the writings of John Derbyshire, Jim Goad, and Gavin McInnes.
Ramz also led me to the venerable Jared Taylor, who had kept the intellectual infrastructure of white identity alive during a period of harsh ideological repression. Jared’s dignified and aristocratic style appealed to affluent Boomers, and I could use his videos to show my parents that my new beliefs were entirely reasonable, and I wasn’t becoming some crazed neo-Nazi.
As we descended further and further down this rabbit hole, mainstream American politics became increasingly polarized along racial lines. The GOP establishment performed its famous “autopsy” of Romney’s failed 2012 campaign and concluded that it needed to support open borders to remain electorally viable with Hispanics. Meanwhile the Democrat establishment foolishly began cheering the white man’s demise on seemingly every other talk show, and pundits spoke openly about immigration creating a permanent Democratic majority.
As it turns out years later, a lot of this talk emerged from a bad reading of exit polling. Obama’s victory mostly came from the midwestern white working class despising Romney as an out of touch plutocrat. But nobody realized this until it was too late, and the false impression of an incredibly racially polarized electorate with devastating implications for the GOP given projected demographic changes began to meme this racial divide into reality.
Sadly, President Obama did nothing to halt this trend or assuage people’s fears. Safe in his second term and frustrated by GOP intransigence, Obama abandoned his early attempts at unity and let loose his inner ethno-nationalist. During the George Zimmerman trial he notoriously claimed that Trayvon Martin could have been his son, displaying naked racial favoritism during the nation’s highest profile court case. Later he later shocked the country by granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants through an executive order even SNL mocked as overly aggressive.
Ferguson burned. Syrian refugees poured into Germany and abused women in Cologne. For a while things seemed genuinely apocalyptic. What’s worse, it felt like the Republican Party was completely inept at fighting back. Sure Tea Party goofballs like Ted Cruz could gridlock Congress pretty effectively, but in the courts and on the campuses and in the culture it seemed like constant defeat.
It was amidst this pessimism that in late 2012 the Proto Alt Right emerged from the swamps of 4chan and YouTube, and began taking shape on an edgy libertarian blog called The Right Stuff (hereafter TRS).
If Jared Taylor lent the nascent Alt Right its skeleton, Steve Sailer provided its brain, and Richard Spencer infused it with a soul, then Mike Enoch and Jesse of TRS gave it the meat and muscle and sinew it needed to become a living breathing organism.
At first TRS shied away from explicit white nationalism and instead promoted awkward half measures: “Castizo futurism”; “white-presenting nationalism”; aversion to Nazi imagery but a curious fondness for Pinochet memes about throwing commies out of helicopters… There was a lot of confusion in those early days.
The important thing is they were growing a community of intellectually curious and angry young men that exploded in size after Mike and Jesse launched their Daily Shoah podcast in 2014. Thanks to Mike’s cutting analysis, Jesse’s genius for impressions and improvisational humor, and the ample talents of the satirist Morrakiu (a longtime collaborator with Ryan Faulk and the main inspiration for my parodies) the Shoah became a huge success, and arguably the cultural centerpiece of the Alt Right for the extent of its mainstream relevance. I for one listened to every episode from the very beginning, and continued to do so long after I stopped participating in the movement.
Going into 2015 there was definitely a sense in our community that energy was building towards something. I remember so distinctly the June of that year, when Obergefell vs. Hodges enforced gay marriage on the nation, and just a week later a lunatic in a bowlcut shot up a church and made the rebel flag verboten overnight. Everyone was pissed off and despondent and didn’t really feel like supporting Rand Paul’s lamo limp dick libertarian campaign when the libs were going after us so hard.
It was in that particular climate of rage and humiliation that an orange game show host descended a golden escalator and rapidly absorbed our community as his campaign’s intellectual and cultural vanguard.
The Classic Alt Right
When Trump first announced his candidacy virtually all of us were skeptical and suspected he was an untrustworthy showbiz grifter who would inevitably drop out in a few months.
But then he doubled down on his comments about Mexicans. He implied Megyn Kelly had it in for him because she was on the rag. He started humiliating Jeb Bush at every opportunity. This last item in particular started to win a lot of us over, because Jeb was perfectly emblematic of the Neocon GOP establishment we’d come to despise after years of marginalization at their hands. It felt good to see him squirm.
Still there was reticence in those first few months; I distinctly recall Mike Enoch saying in a mid-2015 TDS episode that “we need to use Trump, not let him use us.”
The problem with this approach is that Trump was masterful at throwing us *just* enough bones that letting him use us became incredibly fun. Throughout 2015 and early 2016 the Trump campaign played footsie with the Alt Right. Retweeting meme videos, dogwhistling left and right, only half-heartedly disavowing white nationalists…Trump very deliberately courted us so he could use our online muscle to bully and demoralize neocons and movement conservatives into getting with the program, and this gave him crucial momentum during the GOP primaries.
Trump won where Ron Paul failed because he had mass appeal to normie boomers, but he won where Santorum and Huckabee failed because he had an enormous online army of angry young men who made being a Trump supporter cool. We destroyed the intellectual barriers to populism and white identity politics among smart young conservatives, including most of the activist and thinktank class.
The Alt Right first hit mainstream consciousness and started to crystallize in its mature form when the #cuckservative meme began trending on Twitter in July of 2015. TRS jumped on this opportunity aggressively and called a fatwa on the neocons, encouraging their listeners to join Twitter en masse to help push the trend. With this the Alt Right’s communicative center of gravity shifted from /pol/ to Twitter overnight, and we all began tweeting #cuckservative at every doughy NRO columnist and pink-cheeked chamber of commerce type we could find.
The insult was lightning in a bottle because it not only infuriated establishment Republicans but could also be co-opted by Tea Party types and what would later become the “New Right” or “Alt Light” (ostensible populists and civic nationalists–think the Alt Right sans explicit white identity politics). These figures, most notably Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, rapidly joined our ranks and let us disseminate our ideas among people of a more standard conservative background.
In my opinion this was the precise moment the Alt Right became a force to be reckoned with.
This opening salvo on the neocons is also when I first became a public figure.
My moniker in those first days was “Uncuck the Right”, and I initially positioned myself as a troll account aimed at haranguing mainstream conservatives into being less hostile to white identity politics. I very quickly gained a few hundred followers, and even made private contact with journalists from Alt Light publications who expressed enthusiasm about the Alt Right’s potential.
During these first few months I wasn’t making any parodies or satirical content, and saw myself more as a meta-political theorist and organizer. I naively tried to get everyone on a private subreddit to discuss strategy, but that mostly fell through.
Nonetheless I had some productive discussions with some very smart people behind the scenes during this period, and formulated my own set of goals for the movement.
Walt Bismarck’s Goals for the Alt Right (circa July 2015):
Shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable public discourse to make it politically viable to openly discuss the interests of white people in mainstream politics, in the same way black people or Jewish people discuss their collective interests.
Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics.
Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action.
Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink.
Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.
I knew I would never get people to sign onto these goals if I advocated them publicly in an explicit way—we were too fractious a community to align on a common endpoint. Instead I spent the next few years deliberately using my tweets (and eventually my meme videos) to push the communicative norms and tactics of our movement in the right direction.
Most of this would come from hammering certain memes and brainworms into everyone’s head: “shift the Overton Window”, “don’t punch right”, “no enemies on the Right”, etc. These memes got people to stop thinking so much about object-level policies and more about metapolitics, which IMO allowed us to maintain a certain level of message discipline and tactical coherence that otherwise would have been impossible in such a disorganized guerrilla movement as the 2016 Alt Right.
Anyway, looking back on these goals it’s clear we succeeded in achieving all of them.
That doesn’t mean I still *agree* with them in an uncomplicated way, or like *how* they were achieved, but our overall success is undeniable. Later in this piece I’ll make a more substantial argument as to why.
But back to where we left off.
In August of 2015 I emailed Mike Enoch of TRS asking him to publish an essay I wrote arguing that we need to stop talking so much about the JQ because it turns off conservative normies who might otherwise be amenable to race realism, as well as pro-White Jews.
If I recall correctly I had adopted this position because there was a cute Jewish girl on the outskirts of the movement who I was thirsting after at the time, and I had gotten into my first internecine brawls on Twitter defending her right to participate.
Pretty cringe in retrospect but I was 21, sue me.
Anyway, this was a position I abandoned almost immediately after I sent Mike the essay. The JQ was always an issue that bothered me, but by the end of August I had adopted the mainstream Alt Right position to fit in and because K-Mac’s logic seemed reasonable at the time. This might make me seem intellectually promiscuous or flaky, but understand we were all in ideological flux back then, and TRS itself was still flirting with “castizo futurism” etc. I don’t think the Alt Right was ideologically aligned behind a common program until the end of 2015 at the earliest.
Still, I was very embarrassed when Mike said he couldn’t publish my article because he strongly disagreed with the central thesis. At this point I was a longtime Shoah listener and basically viewed Mike as the leader of the movement, so I saw this as the Alt Right as a whole rejecting my ideas.
Of course this was just me being a silly and insecure young man. Mike wasn’t the leader of the Alt Right. He was the closest thing in those very early days, because he controlled the best platform with the widest reach, and he played the most vital role in bringing people together so guys would stop confusing Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson. But Mike wasn’t so much in charge as he was the Alt Right’s center of gravity. We all listened to TDS and Fash the Nation to have a common reference point for the latest takes on Trump, news of Alt Right conferences and events, internecine struggles and debates, new ecelebs popping into the movement and the latest drama surrounding them, and so on.
Mike did a great job building this infrastructure out, but beyond that role he didn’t really want to be a leader of men.
Richard Spencer did.
And unlike anyone else in the Alt Right, Richard Spencer could.