How the Alt Right Won

a Retrospective from Walt Bismarck

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.

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Some brief notes on chronology

I think it’s useful to divide the Alt Right into four periods:

1. Proto Alt Right (2010 - mid 2015)

2. Classic Alt Right (mid 2015 - early 2016)

3. Peak Alt Right (mid 2016 - mid 2017) 

4. 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.

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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.

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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.  

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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): 

1. 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. 

2. Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

3. Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

4. 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. 

5. 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.

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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.

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Richard Spencer did.

And unlike anyone else in the Alt Right, Richard Spencer could.

Jared Taylor could have pulled it off as a younger man, but by 2015 he wasn’t at the right stage of life to be the sort of firebrand leader this horde of angry 20-somethings wanted to represent them. 

Meanwhile—and at the risk of sounding impolite—pretty much everyone in the Alt Right other than Richard and Jared was simply too weird or autistic or ugly or poor to be the leader we needed. We required someone cool and handsome with an elite education and real resources to represent us, and Richard Spencer delivered.

It was probably at his NPI conference in November 2015 that Spencer definitively took his place as the Alt Right’s leader. He ruffled feathers by inviting Jack Donovan to the event, but the latter’s presence almost served as proof that this iteration of WN could set aside purity spiraling and divisive conflicts over religion to build a robust, youthful, and appealing big tent ideology for the 21st century. Overall I remember thinking the event seemed like a fantastic success. Sure Antifa showed up to spray silly string at attendees, but this was small ball compared to their behavior in 2016 and especially 2017. Spencer came out of NPI 2015 looking like a rock star.

After the Alt Right collapsed it became fashionable to hate on Richard Spencer. I myself participated in this a bit in 2018, and I am ashamed of this now. It was dishonorable and childish. The Alt Right propped the guy up as an idol and then when we needed a scapegoat we shamelessly abandoned him. People smeared him with rumors and innuendo like teenage girls.

Everyone loved Spencer when he was riding high in 2016, gallivanting around playing the bad boy intellectual. We all got the Spencer haircut even if it looked dumb on us. When he got Elle Reeve transparently horny during her own Vice segment it felt like he was capturing the enemy’s woman as a war prize for the glory of our tribe. 

(Note to any Zoomers reading this: If you are ever dismayed by how liberal the girls surrounding you are, just imitate Spencer’s demeanor in that interview. That’s how I still got laid during the worst months of 2020 when seemingly every girl I encountered had become a black nationalist)

None of this is to say that Spencer was without fault. He was definitely arrogant at times during that period and made some unforced errors. But I honestly would have been much worse if the media and thousands of supporters propped me up like that so quickly and in such an exciting time. He did about as well leading the movement as anyone could be expected to. 

He is also the only figure from the Alt Right I still listen to on a regular basis. TRS became boring to me around the time NJP was formed. Jared is great but seldom says anything challenging or provocative (nor would I want him to—he wouldn’t be as effective in his elder statesman role if he did). Pretty much everyone else either disappeared or stagnated or is a latecomer riding the AR’s coattails. Only Spencer changes with the times and consistently has interesting and fresh takes. He got knocked on his ass in 2017/2018, but he got back up almost immediately and has reestablished himself as a serious public intellectual. Everyone else disappeared or grew stale and let Fuentes/Woods/Gariepy define the next iteration of white identity.

I only spoke to Spencer once myself, in the spring of 2016. He’d been impressed by some video essay I made talking metapolitics and strategy and wanted to discuss the possibility of me collaborating with or working for him. It was a great talk, but I was nervous about making a career in the movement, and told him I was pursuing the wagecuck route in a lucrative STEM field with the plan of donating to the Alt Right once I got rich. He told me that was dumb and in practice everyone who says this ends up not giving anything to the movement, and that if I wanted to retreat from WN to make money and raise a family that’s a perfectly legitimate option on its own merits and I should just do that.

Looking back this was fantastic advice and I’m very glad he said this to me. I needed a reality check. I also needed to talk to him to learn about what that lifestyle really meant and thereby foreclose the possibility of becoming a professional activist. A lot of people were encouraging me to go down this road and it wouldn’t have been a good idea. But this was the peak of my influence in the movement, and I was starting to get gassed up by people in the same way he was. 

Which brings me to my part in this story.

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The Tale of Walt Bismarck

Let’s go back to August 2015.

Mike Enoch had rejected my article where I “cucked on the JQ” as we used to say, and I was quite butthurt. Not at Mike, but at myself for writing a piece that now felt lame and milquetoast as any of the neocons we’d spent the past month roasting on Twitter.

More than that I was embarrassed that I was very obviously living through a pivotal moment in history but wasn’t contributing in any important way. At that point my biggest individual successes were as a Twitter troll coordinating astroturfed trending hashtags. I only had about 1000 followers at the time, but by DMing larger accounts and getting them to agree to tweet the same hashtag at a specified time we were able to get a few other phrases trending as we had with #Cuckservative. I think #ColumbusWasAHero was the most successful of my ideas.

But after a while this kind of thing just felt juvenile and small-ball. I wanted to do something more impactful, and thought I had a unique perspective that would make me an effective leader of the movement if I could find the right platform.

I thought about publishing independently on my own blog, but it was around this time that the greater movement from 4chan / TRS was becoming familiar with established thinkers like Spencer, MacDonald, Sailer, etc., and I didn’t feel like I had the educational depth or sophistication to write longform in the same weight class as people like that. I also was starting to realize that organization and strategy weren’t viable roles for as spontaneous and grassroots a movement as the Alt Right, except to the extent they were pursued implicitly or by example.

After a while it dawned on me that I’d be most useful as a self-consciously middlebrow “translator” between Alt Right intellectuals and the masses. I could take the ideas of Spencer / Sailer / MacDonald and put them in a more accessible form that would reach people who’d never sit through a two hour podcast or fifty page article.

More importantly, I could intersperse these ideas and memes with incessant references to the aforementioned tactical brainworms (e.g. “Shift the Overton Window”, “Don’t Punch Right”, “No Enemies to the Right”), and in doing so influence both the masses and the Alt Right intelligentsia / leadership (who I made sure to flatter heavily in my works) into thinking about tactics the way I wanted.

My long-term strategic vision for mainstreaming our ideas was to build an interconnected web of transitional figures and content among whom the norm would be to never punch right or purge. Instead we would all platform slightly edgier figures than ourselves, while simply ignoring the *much* edgier figures who might alienate our core audience.

Instead of selling out people to our Right to buy credibility with the Left, we would use our influence to sanitize and promote them, and thereby make ourselves seem moderate and reasonable in comparison.

The logic for this approach was that public figures can always get away with talking to someone only one degree edgier than themselves. Lauren Southern can platform Gavin McInnes who can platform Jared Taylor who can platform Richard Spencer who can platform Kevin MacDonald or David Duke, and everyone in this chain of increasing edginess will benefit from the refusal to purge. K-Mac escapes the ghetto, Lauren looks like a levelheaded moderate to Breitbart Boomers and is less of a target for the SPLC et al.

The Alt Right mostly embraced this strategy in 2016, and this is what pried open the Overton Window to white identity.

It also helped Trump win the general election. “No enemies to the Right” meant that overt white nationalists could hide in plain sight amongst milquetoast Alt Light civic nationalists and boomer populists. This let us “motte and bailey” liberals into conflating our most radical elements with MAGA voters as a whole, most famously when Hillary called half of Trump’s voters a “basket of deplorables”.

This was a fantastic outcome for us. It increased the AR’s political salience and significantly hurt Hillary’s appeal with independents, who likely thought she was talking about Boomers in Wisconsin who hated NAFTA. More importantly, it created a feedback loop wherein political polarization strengthened the new conservative culture of not punching Right, which in turn gave us more space to inflame liberals into overreacting and further polarizing normie conservatives.

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At this point I should probably emphasize that I’m not so narcissistic as to think this all happened because of my Disney parodies. The strategies and tactics described above were in many ways embedded in the AR’s origins and fundamental goals. And from the very beginning Spencer and TRS wanted a big tent, shying away from overt attempts at tactical coordination and preferring to “let a thousand flowers bloom”.

Rather I think my contribution was theorycrafting a big-picture framework to rationalize and systematize what was already happening in the movement, and then creating propaganda that captured this framework in distinct talking points. Using memorable and nostalgic jingles I explained to the masses who we were, what we wanted, and how we were pursuing it.

To widen my exposure I published this content alongside more basic bitch stuff that Lauren Southern and Gavin McInnes could safely share on Twitter, like bog standard invectives against Syrian #rapefugees. It always annoyed me that these infinitely less intelligent videos got the most views by far of all my content, but I figured if I kicked even one or two Breitbart normies to AmRen or NPI it was worth it.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s overselling myself to say this effort played a big part in defining the Alt Right’s communicative norms and outreach tactics in late 2015 to early 2016. A ton of people later told me they found the AR through my work, including some prolific content creators and important thought leaders.

Eight years later I still consider this the greatest achievement of my life.

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You may be wondering why I chose Disney parodies as my vehicle of propaganda.

The idea actually wasn’t original. The Gamergate movement of 2014 had spawned a series of Disney parodies called “/v/ the musical”, which were basically Walt Bismarck videos but about how video games shouldn’t have lesbians or fat women in them. I saw that this format had a ton of potential but was being criminally underutilized, so I stole the idea and made parodies about white nationalism instead. I was Elvis and Gamergate was black people.

But why in particular did Disney work so well?

One reason is that it hits people in a nostalgic and vulnerable place. Disney cartoons are one of the last vestiges of the American monoculture—we all grew up watching these movies on VHS. They come from a simpler era when the country was still overwhelmingly white (or at least ostensibly so to people in the ‘burbs), when wokeism / SJWism wasn’t rampant, when homosexuality was marginal, and when the worst of mainstream feminism was a limp girl power ethos.

People are vastly more susceptible to right wing propaganda when you get them misty eyed about their childhood in this way.

Disney also codes as soft, childish, and inoffensive. This let me include a lot more challenging content, in terms of both intellectual complexity and political radicalism. There’s a pretty low ceiling to how hateful or dangerous a message can seem coming from Sebastian the Crab or Lumiere the Candlestick.

The format of a Disney song (and a lot of the conventions of musical theater in general; pretty much all the classic 90s Disney films are just animated stage musicals) is also fantastic for telling a story. My songs all featured a coherent central “narrative”, in which thematic elements from the original Disney song were “mirrored” to analogous elements from the Alt Right worldview in a creative and funny way.

This is the biggest thing that separated my song parodies from the many others coming out of the Alt Right during this era, which seldom did anything more clever than replacing “You” with “Jew”. My songs were never so pedestrian. They always told a story with an emotional thrust similar to that of the original song. This allowed me to communicate certain ideas through subtext, which freed up lyrical space to get a more complex message across or tell more jokes. It’s similar to how Lin-Manuel Miranda used hip hop and musical theater conventions to subtextually explain the founding fathers to black people and teenage girls.

A good example of what I’m talking about can be seen in my song “In the GOP”, which parodies “On the Open Road” from A Goofy Movie. Here Max’s frustration with his out of touch father Goofy is repurposed to drive home the Alt Right’s frustration with Boomer “constitutional conservatives” following Ted Cruz’s victory in the 2016 Iowa Caucus. Almost every line in my parody hits a similar thematic beat as a line from the original. A prisoner getting hauled off by police becomes a dissident doxxed and fired for wrongthink, an intimidating truck driver becomes the SPLC, and so on.

Another good one is “Fall in Line”, which reframes Scar’s song “Be Prepared” from The Lion King as George Soros directing Black Lives Matter to set Ferguson ablaze so he can bring down the white race.

But perhaps the greatest example is “The National Review”, which turns Hunchback’s “Bells of Notre Dame” into an operatic indictment of William F. Buckley’s ancient purge of the Far Right, as well as a paean to Jared Taylor’s tireless work keeping white identity alive in relative obscurity from the 1990s through the early 2010s.

But obviously the videos couldn’t just be smart or moving; they needed to be funny as well. This was the final advantage to Disney songs—that they’re perfect for bombarding the viewer with dozens of punchlines, memes, and references in rapid succession. In every song there are tons of funny side characters who can be compared with various politicians or ecelebs, as well as exaggerated and fanciful imagery that can be tied to comparable phenomena from the Alt Right.

In my earliest works I took advantage of this by stuffing my videos with memes that catered specifically to the TRS audience, who had largely followed the same intellectual trajectory as me from New Atheism through Ron Paul and Hoppe and helicopters into WN. I began my meme career with an enormous installed base because I knew exactly how to make these guys laugh and feel seen, and that got me featured on TRS and shared all over /pol/.

If you want some good examples of this, check out “NAP” (a parody of Aladdin’s “Prince Ali” about Alt Right frustration with race-blind libertarians), “Dildoween” (a parody of “This is Halloween” from Nightmare Before Christmas, and a general repudiation of cultural leftism steeped in TRS nomenclature), and “IQ Tests” (an HBD take on Beauty and the Beast’s “Be Our Guest”).

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By early 2016 I had achieved my goal of making a major impact, and was one of the largest Alt Right channels on YouTube. At this point I had been on TRS’s premier newscast Fash the Nation a few times, as well as a few minor podcasts, so most of the AR knew who I was, and I had spoken privately with most of the major figures.

I had become something of an eceleb, and this opened up a lot of cool doors for me.

For example, Jared Taylor asked me to collaborate with him on a music video for the 2016 American Renaissance conference. Jared was a longtime hero of mine, so this was without question the coolest thing that happened to me during this era. The video (a parody of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) ended up being very well received, and IMO captures the Alt Right’s energy at its peak better than almost any other piece of media from that time.

There were naturally downsides to this newfound attention. In late 2015 I naively agreed to an interview with a curly-haired bespectacled fellow who buttered me up in the Twitter DMs and proceeded to shit all over me in a hit piece for his commie rag. He left out all my best quotes and deliberately looked around for stuff to embarrass me–pretty sure in retrospect he was trying to doxx me the whole time. Thankfully the next year his silly internet magazine let him go. It looks like he went to law school after that and today works as a staff attorney for Legal Aid.

Anyway, I can’t pretend I was selfless or humble with my newfound influence. I definitely let it give me a big head. I enjoyed feeling powerful and consequential. That’s why I give Spencer and everyone else in the Alt Right’s leadership a lot of grace for anything they did during that era. We were the vanguard of an enormous realignment in American politics. I’m not sure anyone could have resisted becoming a bit arrogant or megalomaniacal in that environment.

And honestly when you’re the leader of a movement or making content that brings in tens of thousands of people you’re allowed to be a bit selfish or cocky sometimes. You shouldn’t have to adhere to the same standards as the proles and trolls who just consume and aren’t intellectually generative.

If you want to use your position to make money or get women or boss people around a little bit that’s your damn prerogative and quite frankly the reward you deserve for advancing the mission. People who complain about this are always giant losers who never contribute anything but impotent whining.

Any movement that tears down its leaders when they don’t act like humble ascetics at all times is going to attract nothing but unambitious filth and will inevitably lose out to movements that let their rockstars act like rockstars. Quite frankly Richard Spencer was a saint compared to how he could have acted, and everyone should be deeply ashamed for the way we treated him in 2018.

At any rate, I sadly never got the chance to grift off my content because I was paranoid about Disney’s copyright lawyers. Even without me trying to monetize my channel they came after me like bloodhounds. This didn’t bother me too much though—I had a nice paying STEM job lined up. The real advantages of celebrity for me weren’t financial, they were social.

At the time I was a 22yo autiste with no relationship experience to speak of, largely due to having been a weird homeschooled kid who started college at 14. Suffice it to say the possibility of status within the movement rectifying this lack of experience was never lost on me.

This was, in fact, another huge benefit to using Disney songs. Young women—especially spergy young women—love musical theater. Millennial women in general adore 90s Disney films. And a lot of girls love the idea of getting famous for singing on the internet. It doesn’t take an Ashkenazi IQ to see where this is headed.

Guys in the scene used to make fun of me for being a cringe theater kid into musicals and would imply this made me gay or something. I definitely *am* a cringe theater kid, but my YouTube comments section was also one of the few venues on the Alt Right that wasn’t a total sausagefest, and from the very beginning I had dozens of women messaging me wanting to sing in my videos.

By the end of 2015 this had yielded my first girlfriend—a gorgeous amazonian blonde I spent the next few years of my life madly in love with. She was a free spirit and I never got her to marry me, but thanks to her I learned I *could* get a beautiful woman, and that obliterated a lot of the mental barriers that had been holding me back in my personal life.

Later in 2018 after this girl and I broke up (and I had been banned from Twitter for over a year) I was still able to make a new account and use my cachet to immediately ask out another girl—the host of a popular trad women’s podcast—with barely an introduction. I literally DM’d her “Hey I’m Walt Bismarck, your voice is hot, will you go on a date with me?” and it worked! Apparently I was the one who had brought her into the AR two years before, so it was an easy sell. The chemistry wasn’t there IRL unfortunately, but we still became great friends afterward, so I count it as a success.

Honestly whenever I read incel narratives I always think they should just get famous online in some niche subculture. It’s really easy to get women that way and if you have a 120+ IQ there is bound to be *something* you could get famous for.

Anyway, the Alt Right also won me the closest friendship of my life with a man of similar age and comparable celebrity. This guy was an intellectual titan and taught me so much about the world. We were best friends for several years but have drifted apart since then, and it would be dishonorable to say anything more. Still I’m pretty sure I’ll never connect with anyone like I did with him. No homo.

Looking back these experiences are what the Alt Right meant to me more than anything else—it was a community. Probably the only real community I’ve ever known. As a somewhat autistic and extremely disagreeable guy who never fit in growing up, the Alt Right not only had a place for me, but allowed me to very quickly accrue status/prestige and use it to make interesting friends, while dating the sort of women I could envision a future with.

Most of my object-level beliefs have changed since those days, but I still have a deep reverence for the climate of intellectual openness and incredible density of creative people all concentrated in one place during that era.

I know I’m not the only one who has a story like this. For a certain kind of person the AR was the ultimate social network and a key instrument in their self actualization, and that’s a big part of why it was so successful. 

I guess I’m trying to say the real ethnostate is the friends we made along the way.

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The Peak Alt Right

The most interesting parts of my own Alt Right story mostly end in mid 2016. It’s around this time I got my first professional job with a decent salary I wouldn’t want to lose by being doxxed, and by this point I was trying to take things in a more serious direction with my aforementioned casting couch girlfriend. Between these factors I just didn’t have enough time or energy for mememaking.

I also started to lose the fire in my belly. I wasn’t as angry anymore. It’s easy to make spicy content when you’re an incel neet, but when you’re learning how both girls and a corporate environment work for the first time it’s hard to have that irreverent cocky energy you need to make good Walt Bismarck videos, and you start to get in a more ambivalent headspace. I still remained active on Twitter during this time, but my video output fell to almost nothing for the rest of the year.

This happened roughly around the time Trump locked down the GOP nomination, which is also when the character of the Alt Right started to change in a really noticeable way.

In 2015 almost everyone in the Alt Right was intellectually generative and capable of critical thought. It genuinely felt like a movement with an average IQ in the 120s. A big part of this is that we weren’t normal Republicans or even conservative by temperament. We were eccentric nerds and hipsters rebelling against woke academia/media because of our disagreeableness. 

But as Trump picked up steam in early 2016 and started winning primaries left and right you started to see a lot more normie conservatives getting drawn into the Alt Light, and by extension the Alt Right. The median Alt Righter on Twitter started to look more like an average Trump supporter. He became more likely to have a blue collar background or to have been raised in a conservative family. He became higher conscientiousness in temperament but lower openness. The average IQ probably dropped to around 110. The new Alt Righter wasn’t a khakis and polo kind of guy. 

Obviously nobody objected to this because we wanted to grow and genuinely loved that our ideas had found currency with middle America.

But I always felt that another part of this acceptance was motivated by an insecurity with our own white collar / academic backgrounds. A lot of software engineers and grad students and bureaucrats in our movement deeply wanted to be accepted by truckers and roofers, and they often put on a weird facade hoping to accomplish this, or alternatively would embrace a bizarrely self-hating attitude toward their own class. Clearly this is because they resented their woke yuppie coworkers and saw virtue in the simple traditionalism of blue collars and ruralites, but it still came off as weak and insecure to me—no different from being a self-hating White.

This insecurity led us to cede control over the Alt Right’s brand to less intelligent “heritage conservatives”, and this is IMO a big part of why the movement became another wignat pariah ideology in the popular consciousness. The reason we were so successful in 2015 and even received some moderately favorable coverage from liberal journalists early on is that they were so surprised by our affluent progressive backgrounds (“how could someone turn away from MY values?”) and the fact that we weren’t fat / stupid / ugly. By mid 2016 we had completely given that up in exchange for hobbit support that started to dilute the movement.

But while this dilution ruined our intellectual rigor and aesthetic appeal, it simultaneously allowed us to cross-pollinate the Conservative Intellectual Universe in a way that accomplished all the goals I had listed above–just in a less cool or fun or glamorous way than anyone had envisioned.

And that is the real story of 2016 - 2017: We gave up what made us interesting for what could make us maximally influential, and in doing so ensured a long-term victory bought with our own martyrdom at Charlottesville. 

But it’s very possible this approach was simply necessary as a corollary to the “no enemies to the Right” strategy I had described above. As we became accepted by the Alt Light and MAGA more generally, we had to tolerate becoming more like them.

And by mid 2016 Trump no longer needed the Alt Right to batter Ted Cruz supporters on Twitter, and instead had to pivot to the general. If we had purity spiraled against the Alt Light and Tea Party types as Trump was consolidating the party he probably would have just Sister Souljah’d us. 

So we never drew stark lines separating ourselves from the Alt Light and civic nationalists, but neither did we simply pretend to be them. Instead we “hid in plain sight”, maintaining friendly relations with Alt Light leaders long enough for our more virile ideas to spread among their ranks, and for an ambiguity to emerge over our identity that could shield us from purging.

As I noted above, this ambiguity proved incredibly useful to Trump in the general by creating a “motte and bailey” phenomenon that severely damaged the Clinton campaign. When Hillary called Richard Spencer deplorable, Joe Normie in Wisconsin felt like she was talking about him. When she said the Alt Right supports Trump, Joe Normie wondered whether *he* might be Alt Right. Maybe he would give that term a Google. And if he landed on a Jared Taylor or Ramzpaul video, there’s a good chance he’d answer in the affirmative, at least for a few months. He’d probably repudiate the movement eventually, but he’d almost certainly leave it with exposure to a whole host of ideas he’d never have encountered otherwise.

And so it was that the Alt Right and Hillary Clinton together obliterated the cordon sanitaire of American politics and permanently severed the Left’s moral authority over conservatives.

The Overton Window had been ripped off its hinges.

---

Trump’s victory in 2016 was probably the most exciting night of my life. Every few months I rewatch clips from that evening. It was the culmination of over a year of intense emotional energy that paid off precisely as I’d wanted (and like our old friend Ryan Faulk had predicted in some truly inspired election analysis–watch his old videos on the “Monster Vote” if you want to see why I respect the guy so much).

Sadly in this euphoria I very much lost the plot and began to have expectations for the Trump administration that could never be realized. I was nervous in the subsequent weeks as he filled his administration with neocon squishes, but held on to the naive hope that he’d bend them to his will as he’d done to everyone else that year.

This was enough to inspire me with a final manic burst of creative energy, and during this period I released the last three songs of my mimetic career, all of which reveled in the possibilities of the new world we’d unleashed and were much more upbeat than my earlier works.

Sadly, it was also around this time that the cracks in the movement began to show. When Richard Spencer gave his famous “Hail victory” speech at NPI 2016 it alienated most of the Alt Light, a lot of whom now felt free to purge the Alt Right with reckless abandon since Trump was safely elected. 

This was demoralizing at the time, but in retrospect it was clearly less of an ideological repudiation than a divergence in the aesthetics of political presentation. Spencer thought he was still leading an edgy movement of Nietzschean creatives, but the Alt Right had become so intermingled with the Alt Light’s low openness Christian nationalism and prairie hobbit sensibilities that the same vibes which read as “James Bond” in 2015 now read as “insane neo-Nazi”.

In truth the Alt Light didn’t want to purge us. They wanted to steal our good ideas and sanitize them for the Shire before throwing us to the wolves. 

The plan was always to sacrifice us to redeem MAGA’s sins and create a path for Christian nationalism wedded to incoherent and mostly unstated boomer uncle racism, without any talk of ethnostates or Faustian spirits.

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The Charlottesville Martyrdom

After Trump’s inauguration everyone got really into real life rallies and marches for some reason. I thought it was a good idea at the time and supported it as the next phase of the movement, but in retrospect it was the worst thing we could do.

Centering the Alt Right around brawling with Antifa in the streets like some LARP of 1930s Germany didn’t do anything to endear us to solid middle class people and just filled the movement with unstable white trash. 

But at the same time we were mostly angry guys in our early 20s and we really wanted to get in fights with commies. My fellow eceleb buddy and I used to start political arguments with random strangers in this era, so I’m not going to judge anyone who braved the piss buckets. 

Anyway, a few months into 2017 I was banned from Twitter. Unfortunately almost nobody noticed this because on that very same day Trump decided to launch a strike on Syria that infuriated the AR and caused most of us to formally break with him.

I was theoretically among these people, but to be honest I am a selfish POS and cared a lot more about my Twitter ban. Pretty much all my friends were on Twitter and I had over a year’s worth of DMs with my girlfriend saved on there. It felt like my social life and a lot of great memories had been obliterated alongside all those Syrians. 

Obviously I made a new account in short order, but I never got anywhere near my original follower count, and permanently lost contact with most people other than my closest friends. At this point I basically assumed a passive role in the movement. My new accounts would always get banned with increasing frequency, and eventually I just stopped creating them.

---

In the summer of 2017 I moved across the country to be closer to my girlfriend, and my best friend (the other eceleb) ended up coming with and getting an apartment in the same city. I was 23 at the time, but had been a very sheltered young man, so in a lot of ways this was the year I came into my own as a wild young buck.

Part of that involved my buddy and I regularly getting shitfaced (a first for me but nothing new for him) and arguing for white nationalism against random liberals in entirely inappropriate locations and situations. The stories I have of these experiences could fill a novel.

Another part involved chasing and wooing and repeatedly getting my heart broken by a beautiful girl. This year forced me to learn those hard lessons that break every young man at some point. Count yourself lucky if you were broken at 16 and not 23.

But by far the most impactful part of this year was me coming to terms with the world and not seeing myself as a “dissident” anymore.

That’s not to say I no longer felt like an outsider—I’m too autistic and weird to ever not feel that way. But at this point I had a near six figure job and an extremely cute (if on-and-off) girlfriend in close proximity instead of in a tenuous LDR, so I was pretty content with life and didn’t really feel like a “natural radical”, if that makes sense.

When I was poor and not getting laid I hated everyone and was genuinely attracted to fascism, but by this point I didn’t want to upset the apple cart, and kind of became a basic bitch Republican deep down. The issues I REALLY cared about were curbing H1Bs to keep my salary high, cutting funding to universities that annoyed me, making it illegal to fire me for talking about race and IQ, and forcing Twitter to give me back my account so I could shitpoast all day. 

I still identified as WN and held most of the same views nominally, and certainly didn’t pass up the opportunity to argue for WN (even in bizarrely inappropriate circumstances, like against my hard left boss’s boss and a random Haitian intern during an Uber ride to a company barbecue). But it was kind of like my libertarianism in 2014, where I was reciting the arguments algorithmically and mostly just holding the position for social / identity reasons. 

So despite wanting to go to Charlottesville to meet everyone IRL I ultimately decided to stay in town that day, for the sole reason that my girlfriend and I had just gotten back together after a long break and I wanted to get laid. 

After everything went down I felt like a selfish piece of shit for not being there, but I was obviously very glad to have avoided the fallout. Still, it wasn’t clear to me at first what sort of consequences those events would have.

To his credit, my buddy picked up on it right away. 

“Someone has died.

They’re going to hang this over our head forever now.

It’s all over.”

I thought he was being hysterical and it would blow over in a couple months.

Obviously that was a very braindead take. 

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The Late Alt Right

For the rest of 2017 I mostly disengaged from the Alt Right and focused on my career and personal life. I still listened to the Shoah, but tuned out whenever Charlottesville came up. I wanted to just not think about it and focus more on normie political news.

But even that was depressing. The Alabama Senate special election late that year indicated to me that a Blue Wave was likely coming and Trump definitely wasn’t going to achieve what I wanted him to.

One of the weird things about American politics is that it’s so thermostatic and reactive that it feels a lot better to be a member of the party out of power. The median independent voter always wants to “throw the bastards out” and feels like the opposition has moral legitimacy, so when the President is on the other team it feels like your side has the momentum.

It’s comfy when there’s a Democrat president because everyone hates them and normies are more amenable to your ideas, but in 2017 it felt really hellish anticipating our trifecta being pulled apart like string cheese.

Anyway, one thing I recall from this period is that a lot of people insisted the Alt Right was stronger than ever and still growing.

To me this was the sign it was on its last legs. 

I think the moment the AR truly died was in March of 2018, when Heimbach had his famous sex scandal involving his mother in law and Parrot’s cuckbox. In my opinion Morrakiu’s song about this was the single funniest parody from those years, easily beating anything I ever made. This was a much-needed moment of levity for the movement and IMO gave the Alt Right the right kind of death. We went down laughing instead of crying. 

And I think on some level we all knew the party was over at this point, so it felt like a mercy killing. We had probably stuck around a year longer than we needed to. Trump was in office and there wasn’t any clear means for us to influence normie politics in an interesting way—certainly not after Charlottesville—so it made sense to dissolve our formal coalition and go back to internecine debate and theorizing. 

Obviously the death of our movement as a consolidated force didn’t mean the death of our individual platforms. TRS remained strong and vibrant, if somewhat ghettoized. New figures like JF Gariepy were emerging and making a big impact. WNs no longer had mainstream relevance, but things didn’t feel terrible if you weren’t in Roberta Kaplan’s direct line of fire.

But as the Alt Right’s initial Gen X leadership struggled with the legal fallout of Charlottesville, 2018 also saw a lot of the Millennials who’d formed the backbone of the 2015-2016 Alt Right start to fade into the background and make way for the first wave of Zoomers.

Perhaps like me these guys were simply getting caught up with their adult lives and weren’t as invested in radical activism. Or perhaps Charlottesville had spooked or demoralized them. 

Either way, it was clear that the Alt Right’s demise and Spencer’s fall from grace gave Nick Fuentes and his groypers an open path to define the future of white identity.

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Nick Fuentes and the Dissident Right

I don’t have that much to say about Fuentes because I never interacted with the guy and have only watched him in small doses. At least in his early years he was drenched in irony to appeal to the younger Zoomers in his audience, and this chafed against my Millennial earnestness. I’m pretty sure he’d likewise find a lot of my sensibilities very cringe and cheugy. 

Fuentes was the only person in the movement who had Spencer’s raw charisma and talent for mobilizing young men, but I think the fallout of Charlottesville forced him to take leadership of the Post Alt Right (hereafter Dissident Right) at too young an age, and this led to him making a lot of unforced errors. Like all clever young men he was intellectually self-indulgent, and this did a lot to undermine him. For instance, that famous cookies metaphor was hysterical and artfully done, but it made his respectability politics and optics fixation seem incoherent and insincere. 

Despite this Fuentes seems to have matured a lot, and (from my somewhat inattentive POV) appears to have finished what Spencer started. He was exactly the right guy to consolidate our intellectual colonization of the Alt Light during the Trump years. Unlike Spencer he wasn’t attached to the Alt Right brand and had more flexibility to experiment with different tactics, and if anything his youth gave him more latitude to play around this way. 

More importantly, Fuentes’s Zoomer irony poisoning was a fantastic way of dealing with Boomer / normie incoherence and slowly pushing them in our direction. A Zoomer can talk like a Christian Reaganite on the streets and a WN in the sheets and sincerely be committed to both positions, and this allows him to persuade chronically inconsistent Boomers in a way that more rigorous and earnest Gen Xers and Millennials would never be capable of. 

The Zoomers never could have ripped the Overton Window off its hinges like we did, but they’ve been fantastic at preventing anyone from closing it shut. When Charlie Kirk tried, Fuentes made him eat shit. For that feat alone I consider him a worthy successor to Spencer.

These kids picked up the pieces of the AR and built a DR I could never identify with or understand, but which has absolutely advanced White identity politics in a way I never would have expected in 2018. They’ve cemented the legacy of their earnest Millennial elder brothers doxxed and browbeaten at Cville, and mostly prevented Alt Light grifters from purging our ideas from the MAGA ecosystem. Without this effort I highly doubt Vivek would have been able to defend the Great Replacement Theory on a national debate stage.

That said, the DR has largely been a reactive and defensive movement. Their role has been to keep the door ajar and strengthen the sentiments we injected into the body politic in 2015. They have not themselves been intellectually generative or innovative, and have largely succeeded by draping themselves in an exaggerated half-ironic patriotism or Christian fundamentalism and exploiting ideological ambiguity. In doing so they run the risk of being tied down by the more conventional vulnerabilities of American conservatism. 

But this is not my fight anymore and hasn’t been for a long time, so I will not concern troll the Zoomers or pretend I’m qualified to give them strategic advice.

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My Argument for the Alt Right’s Success

Some people will always think the Alt Right failed because we never built Hyperborea in New Jersey. I’m not looking to convince these people.

I instead ask the reader to recall why we all became White Nationalists in 2015, and to consider the relevant ways in which American politics have changed since then. Think about the objectives most of us deemed achievable before getting hyped up by the emotional intensity of 2016.

There was always a tension in the Alt Right between “white nationalists” in the vein of Richard Spencer—who dreamt of a White ethnostate and peaceful separation—and “white advocates” like Jared Taylor, who were more focused on improving the immediate situation of white people within established institutions. Initially I was on the Taylorite side, and the set of goals I privately laid out for the movement were highly practical and short-term. But like everyone else my age I got caught up in the energy of those years, and by the end of 2016 I had largely signed on to Spencer’s lofty Faustian program of racial separatism. Because of this scope creep, my narrative for much of 2019 and 2020 was that the Alt Right had been an utter failure.

Looking back with greater sobriety (and without the Summer of Floyd confounding public sentiment), I feel like we shot for the moon and landed among the stars.

We achieved an overwhelming victory within a Taylorite context by adopting Spencerist objectives and marching toward them with fanatical determination. 

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Let’s go through the initial goals I laid out earlier in this piece and assess where we are today on each one:

Goal 1 - 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. 

Huge victory. 

These days you can complain about quotas etc. being unfair to you as a white man and it’s not inflammatory or low status among centrists and conservatives. Even non-woke liberals won’t really hate you for it, just quietly think you’re a bit of a chud. This was not the case in 2015. 

Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS and the necessary legal infrastructure is being deployed to burn it down. Mainstream conservatives are mobilizing a lot of resources and energy to this end.

Vivek defended the Great Replacement Theory on national television and remained a major Trump surrogate. The SPLC would have marginalized him for that 10 years ago. Today because of polarization and MAGA closing ranks they can’t do shit.

Sure Vivek gets away with more because he’s Indian, but some of the stuff he was saying in interviews last year to gin up DR support was to the right of Jared and Gavin and could have been published on 2014 TRS. 

Some people might say the AR never won on this issue because in mixed company you still need to dogwhistle, and most middle class white people don’t want to hear you say the word “white”. This is the sort of autistic technicality I would freak out about as a young man but doesn’t actually matter for practical politics. If you just say “Americans” or “real Americans” everyone on the Right knows what you mean and you have enough plausible deniability to motte and bailey liberals if they flip out.

Also I personally just say “as a White man...” all the time and most people find it amusing and charming. If you aren’t in a DSA meeting or some shit it’s not going to cost you socially at all like it would have in 2013.

As Richard Hanania pointed out recently, being mildly racist is actually a great way to seduce liberal women, as it shows you aren’t scared of them.

Goal 2 - Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

We won too much here! I for one am tired of winning.

These days Republicans *only* care about these issues and it’s becoming problematic. It’s now politically toxic in the GOP to express interest in any fiscal policy issues or to talk numbers. Judging by recent primary results only 20-30% of the GOP cares about that stuff now.

Eight years ago I would have loved this development. As a young man with nothing to my name I couldn’t have cared less about marginal tax rates and just wanted to stop immigration / affirmative action and fight back against extreme feminism and cultural leftism in our institutions. 

These days I make very good money and even employ a few people at my own LLC, so my priorities are more in line with the median Nikki Haley voter. But that’s an issue for another time. 

Goal 3 - Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

Basically a victory, mostly because of polarization to which we massively contributed.

Hanania is untouchable. Steve Sailer is prolific on Twitter and largely respectable in the mainstream Right. Pretty much every intelligent young conservative has been exposed to HBD and knows the arguments. It’s largely just voluntary politeness that’s kept the IQ charts from going more mainstream.

Still you can see the impact of HBD in changing attitudes toward affirmative action. Everyone on the Right understands that differences in outcome aren’t going away, even if they tiptoe around the root cause of this. Recent DEI discourse surrounding black pilots etc. would have been inconceivable a decade ago.

I’d wager at this point that even Yglesias and Silver know the score.

Goal 4 - 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 

This was our earliest and most obvious win.

Trump helped out by taking forever to disavow WNs during the 2016 primary and saying there were good people on both sides at Cville. But a lot of this we can take credit for ourselves thanks to our incredibly effective propaganda tactics in 2016.

“No enemies to the Right” was a genius strategy that enabled us to hide in plain sight among civic nationalists, and this tactic motte and bailey’d Hillary into destroying her own campaign with her Basket of Deplorables speech

Goal 5 - Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.

This one is really interesting and I am going to go out on a limb and say something controversial: 

The Alt Right basically “solved” the JQ by calling out the aforementioned hypocrisy and cementing our revulsion with the double standard into the popular consciousness. 

A decade ago it was extremely common for American Jews to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while simultaneously mobilizing organizations like the SPLC and ADL to repress and ostracize any White Americans with nationalist views.

The Alt Right made a big issue of calling this out, and I think this pressure (in conjunction with the Trump administration’s consistent devotion to Bibi) chastened a lot of young Jewish progressives who sincerely opposed “racism” into becoming anti-Zionists and abandoning their own racial particularism. 

Meanwhile I noticed that a few years ago you stopped seeing that brand of anti-White and rabidly Zionist neocon that was so common in the Bush and Obama eras. For instance, Ben Shapiro used to be one of the biggest enemies of the Alt Right, but by the end of the Trump administration he was a lot less aggressive about trying to purge white identity from conservatism. It seemed that by 2020 most sincere Zionists (particularly the younger ones) stopped seeing a potential Shoah in American nationalists, and instead reasoned that it would be more effective to ally with them against Palestine-sympathetic Third Worldists.

Quite frankly I am returning to my August 2015 roots and cucking on the JQ. I am Taylorpilled. Most young secular right wing Jews these days are pro-White and don’t treat being ethnically Jewish as that different from being, say, Italian.

If you look at someone like Inez Stepman she has good pro-White takes on every issue and never tries to shapeshift in a manipulative way. I’m not going to be part of any movement that rejects someone like her out of braindead grug anti-Semitism.

And before you ask, no, this time I’m not just thirsting after the belle juive. I’d say the same thing about Amy Wax. Besides, these days I only date Zoomer women.

Now I’m sure a lot of WNs reading this will call me a chump for thinking this way and say it’s all a big scheme, they’re playing both sides, something about a caduceus, etc. Let’s assume that’s true for the sake of argument.

It’s still the case that the coalitional politics surrounding the Gaza War have forced American Jews to choose between allying with right wing Whites on one hand and abandoning their ethnic interests to become deracinated globalists on the other.

Most will choose the latter and continue to lose power due to intermarriage or low TFR, but a lot of them will choose the former and Jews will by necessity become much more conservative and pro-White as a result. Whatever vestiges of power they retain will be a boon for right wing Whites. We will likely need their financial and media clout in the coming struggle against the much more dangerous H1B elite.

Seriously, if any of you wignats worked in tech this would be your real concern. None of you wordcels understand the true meaning of ethnic nepotism. But that’s an article for another day.

In hindsight, I think the JQ had particular salience to the Alt Right because we grew up in the Neocon era seeing extreme Zionists marginalize Ron Paul. There were also a lot of Buzzfeed journalists with curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses writing anti-White thinkpieces in 2014. But things are different today. Get with the times.

Once Bibi’s had his way with Gaza the Zionists will need to kiss the American Nationalist ring FAR more than the other way around.

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So what now?

I am no longer a White Nationalist.

I explain why in another article, but to make a long story short: I feel like we’re broadly headed in the right direction on racial issues, and other matters have become much more important.

My biggest issues right now are crushing the gerontocracy and maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. There’s also a serious public health issue emerging with executive functioning and dopamine regulation caused by TikTok, social media, porn, etc., and it’s getting worse with each successive generation. IMO if we don’t fix this everything else becomes irrelevant.

I’ve also just stopped identifying the totality of white people as my ingroup. I’ll stand forever with true scions of Rome, but not with boring unambitious hobbits. A lot of white people are lazy and stupid and self-destructive and I don’t see Rome in their eyes. Europe has basically become as stagnant and docile as Ming China, and most “nice white” parts of America like Nebraska and Vermont are wretchedly provincial and effeminate in their character. It’s in more diverse regions like Texas and Florida on the Right and Cali / NY on the Left where you see true dynamism—where things actually happen and people have any sense of imperial destiny. These are the places that attract elites capable of building a better future.

Race isn’t nothing, but it isn’t everything either.

Let it be known that I don’t regret my activism in the Alt Right one bit, and think the movement’s radicalism and intensity were necessary to kick down the door and break a really bad intellectual status quo.

But now it’s time to let the adults back in the room, build a less polarized and more diplomatic society, and ensure the Right has a cadre of sophisticated technocratic voices who can provide an alternative to liberalism and populism.

It’s for that reason that I’ve returned as a public figure to organize the Tortuga Society.