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I can relate to significant pieces of your journey, but in coming from the far left towards the center. I still find many of your views and policy ideas pretty horrendous, but you're a compelling writer and I really enjoyed getting an insider's perspective on all this nonsense. Some scattered thoughts:

- One parallelism seems to be a classic "Big Chill" dynamic like Noah Smith has described - become an adult with an income and suddenly childish ideology is easily discarded.

- I think it's dangerous to take too much pride in one's ideological tribe for being intelligent. You make these self-flattering claims about the early alt-right being particularly intelligent, but what's the difference between that and the left saying they have a stronger claim to truth because they're the party of the college-educated? The reality of intelligence is that it doesn't make us better at discovering truth, it makes us better at rationalizing our pre-conceptions, truth be damned. A bunch of smart, chronically-online trolls are extremely vulnerable to convincing themselves of utter nonsense in order to belong. It's exactly the same dynamic as progressive college campuses, where people self-censor and/or modify their beliefs in order to fit in with the tribe. The difference is those kids grow up and vote for the party that puts boring, competent, technocrats in office, while the Republican party, due to the tilt of the senate and electoral college, can get by without appealing to the sensible middle. (Classic Ezra Klein "Why We're Polarized" stuff.)

- I find it very funny how you slid from the furthest right, to a self-described "basic bitch Republican deep down," and I've thought similar things about my own political transformation. How much is it actually that is tribal ideology stuff is all bullshit, but we still feel too much in-group loyalty to the old extreme nonsense that staying on "the same side" as our stupid childish beliefs is a way to rationalize that our old beliefs were ~at least kind of right~, or some nonsense like that?

- "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." Hilarious how much I could not agree more on this point, despite all our differences.

- I just am not sure how much there is separating you from a grumpy hippie-punching moderate a la Yglesias/Haidt/Noah Smith/et al., aside from a stubborn in-group loyalty to a bunch of dumb kids from your formative years.

And I'll just close with a content recommendation in good faith, to a fellow high-openness, too-online politics junkie, with concerns about the attention economy: check out JREG on Youtube. He is a brilliant satirist, and I think he somehow transcends all of our very significant disagreements.

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Walt: "There’s also a serious public health issue emerging with executive functioning and dopamine regulation ... IMO if we don’t fix this everything else becomes irrelevant."

Logan: "Hilarious how much I could not agree more on this point, despite all our differences."

Third-ing this! Thanks to you both for this. Am hoping many of us can broadly agree that this trend is both profound and problematic, no matter any other political or social differences we might have.

Several recent looks at aspects of this unprecedented-in-human-experience, technology-mediated transition into the unknown ...

On "gradual disengagement from the real world" ...

* From Jon Haidt:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/boy-crisis

* From Jason Pargin:

https://jasonpargin.substack.com/p/is-modern-mass-media-a-mind-prison

On porn, from Isaac Saul:

https://www.readtangle.com/how-dangerous-is-porn/

And most generally, the dopamine loop, and how to try to break free from it, by Ted Gioia:

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-break-free-from-dopamine-culture

As Gioia notes, "The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction ... This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics."

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More from Walt, expressing this far more compellingly than my Aspie-laden linking above, from another post on his blog, https://newaltright.substack.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist:

"The things I’m most worried about currently include: ... the proliferation of high-tech “dopamine traps” like TikTok, VR porn, gambling apps, and bottomless AI-generated content that are so engaging they make everyday responsibilities intolerably boring in comparison, progressively obliterating executive functioning and attention span in each successive generation until everyone is a zombie needing enormous quantities of speed to function in any basic way."

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In defense of the hobbits population, the energetic and ambitious ones boil off to the cities (I've seen it, in the Mid-West). Where, per Spandrell's IQ Shredder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itXkYp34-5U), they don't breed, and all that's left are the dull ones. But it's the breeders who inherit the future. The people with our genes, our temperament, our style, are all that will survive of us genetically, phenotypically, maybe culturally.

On the wide acceptance of race-realism, are you sure enough of that, to, eg, dox yourself? (A thought experiment test of your confidence, I'm not suggesting that.) Personally I think race-realism may never be openly accepted until it somehow doesn't matter, but it needs to be, because even with blacks having AI help, there's still the matter of black violence and whites' inability to Freedom of Association away from it (and other Jared Taylor concerns). Plus, you know, wanting to have Truth reign.

On the JQ, most don't have a problem with known-benign Jews, the problem is that Jews have the same will-to-power as we do, and greater abilities, and will never rest. As Mike Enoch said, there are no Jewish normies (they cease to identify as Jews, pretty much). (See the Fellow White phenomenon for an indication of the scale of non-billionaire, but still deeply racially partisan, Jews.) So is it arbitrary team red vs team blue? Largely, yes, but I suffer what my team suffers, I am hardwired to my team. And there is some part of Team Jew that is dangerous and fighting us, see: Mayorkas, HIAS, Soros District Attorneys etc. It's a matter of the numbers and power of the Jared Taylor Jews, vs those who aren't, or are merely talking nice. Even Laura Loomer is for the Gazan genocide (she mocked Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself). They are absolutely shape-shifters, their motives come from their identity and perceived interests, as do everyone's. You can only judge them by their actions.

I'm with you on the H1B problem, but, too many things going on at once.

I guess this all was to argue for the original alt-right stance. Imo we're far from out of the woods, there's plenty of fighting left to do, and imo it's the same battles, just intensified.

Anyway, nice to know what happened to you; everyone finds / makes his own way.

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Good comment, thank you!

I suppose I trace lineage in less of a purely genetic way than I used to. That's not to say genes don't matter--it's to say that genetic drift is enough of a thing that you can't always subordinate everything to genes. So much of life is kind of random and I don't think it's necessarily healthy to view your biological kids as "heirs to your legacy" like trads do because of regression to the mean and the fact that parenting is a lot less impactful than peer group in terms of life outcomes. You should love your biological kids but also accept there is a high chance genetic drift might make one of them a loser.

I think it's better to take the Five Good Emperors approach and basically "adopt" a younger man you mentor as an adult. From my perspective the most important things shaping who you become as an adult are your friends as a teenager and the older people you deliberately choose as mentors from like 15-25. In this sense you will often have a more substantive (if less intense) paternal dynamic with people met in this capacity.

This perspective is doubtless the result of me living in a city. I think of propagation in more of an ideological way--you pass on a legacy by having people remember your name and share your ideas. My mental model of civilization is tons of normie hobbit 103 IQ farmers having kids and the ones who randomly have 120+ IQs moving to the Big City, where they contribute not by making more people (that's the countryside's job) but by innovating and creating wealth.

I think it's fine for smart people to not have as many children, and suspect this has always been the case. Unless you are a wealthy male being a parent is going to take up a lot of the time you could dedicate to things that improve society more than having kids who will likely end up as midwits. And even rich guys become a lot more risk averse and conservative in their lifestyle after having kids. It changes you psychologically. Contra the trads I think there are a lot of people, especially more neurotic and autistic people with high IQs, who can contribute a lot more to society by inventing things as degenerate polyamorists and singletons.

Re: Race Realism--I am sure enough of this to talk about race and IQ to literally any white person I meet IRL (including bosses at work). I have done this since like 2014, and I used to get pushback but today find it easy. I am extremely open about this kind of stuff with my far left mischling gf and get literally zero pushback.

Doing so online with your name and face is different for obvious reasons, esp if you used to be an eceleb, and esp if want to grow your platform in a different direction. But I will dox myself if I manage to earn enough shekels here to quit my bug jobs. I have a high enough verbal IQ to explain myself in a charismatic and respectful way to anybody who matters to me IRL (including black friends--you lead with them being better runners etc.), and at this point I'm no edgier than Hanania. I would be extraordinarily surprised if it hurt me in any way. But at this point it wouldn't really benefit me to test my theory, so I suppose I am kind of talking a big game without proving it.

On Jews I disagree. Your narrative was true 10-15 years ago, but these days the implicit alliance between neocons and cultural Marxists to contain pro-White sentiment isn't really there anymore. Liberal Jews are rapidly miscegenating themselves out of existence while MAGA has basically turned conservative Jews in FL etc. into Italians at this point. Jewish Zoomers on the Right would be offended if you thought of them as a "minority" because they've never thought of themselves as anything but White. They see people like Bushnell as a breed of extreme hysterical anti-Whites and to them being pro-Israel is pro-White.

Obviously it's more complex than this in reality, but for practical purposes I am okay allying with Zionists at this juncture and think other former and even current WNs should be as well. Trump had already made right wing Jews a lot less hostile to white identity and the Gaza War has just solidified this impulse. They are a natural part of any pro-White coalition and you can use their money and influence to your advantage to further mainstream more explicit pro-White sentiment.

I know people like Enoch would never get on board with this and I don't blame him because he kind of needs to be extreme at this point due to the specific era in which he was doxxed. But everyone who didn't have their life ruined by Roberta Kaplan ought to be more flexible and reevaluate coalitions as circumstances on the ground change IMO.

Anyway, I definitely appreciate your position. I am still a "fellow traveler" with the alt right, and will definitely use any mainstream credibility I obtain to help make white identity more of a normal thing that can be pursued in a less radical capacity within the system. I certainly would platform people to my right and ostracize anyone who tries to maintain a cordon sanitaire. But I also hope WNs from that era would be willing to put race aside when they can be more immediately useful to a coalition seeking change on a more salient or short term issue that impacts White people as much as anyone else.

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If there's high odds one of your kids is a disappointment, the rational response is to have enough kids for that to be an acceptable loss. Adoption has little effect on outcomes.

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Yeah if I have 6 kids with a 120+ IQ woman one of them will almost certainly be extremely accomplished, but I could also use the same time/energy/resources to serve as a force multiplier to many dozens of young men needing guidance. I think either is a legit path but because of my above average neuroticism and personal selfishness I suspect the latter is a better path for someone like me.

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Having children is a reliable way to pass on characteristics. Trying to mold people through teaching is something people have tried to do many times, but is much less reliable. You might think you're poorly suited to the former, but that doesn't make the latter actually effective.

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This is silly. Almost everyone can think of mentors and peers who molded them during adolescence and young adulthood more powerfully than their parents. Meanwhile it's almost impossible for a parent to guarantee their child continues to hold their values as an adult (unless you shelter your kids in repressive cultlike circumstances, and even this doesn't ensure success).

When you're talking about people closer to the middle of the bell curve what you say is more applicable, but exceptional people are almost impossible to predict and control. The Alt Right emerged from the children of elites repudiating the progressive values of their parents, just as past leftist movements emerged from Middle American kids repudiating white bread WASP conservatism.

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Judith Harris would grant your point about peers, but mentors are another story.

Heritability of political ideology applies even at the tails.

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Children of elites? The alt right was a bunch of anonymous people on 4chan doing racisms, getting banned, doxxed, getting in fights with antifa, etc. I can't think of any children of elites who have been in this thing. Richard Spencer's and Mike Enoch's parents maybe were a little more than upper middle class, but every other person I've heard of have been lower or middle class. It's why doxxing has always been such a struggle for the alt right and WN. Most of the podcaster class of WNism that is still left from the alt right era qualify for Medicaid.

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I identify as White!

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> because even with blacks having AI help, there's still the matter of black violence

There is also the matters of:

- causality

- the fact that you are hallucinating, and do not realize it (because you were raised in a deception based culture)

Humans are so silly, I enjoy coming on here and laughing at their tall tales.

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I don’t know about any of the infighting between you guys. I just loved Dildoween and hope that is ok. I still show it to people. There has not been anything as good as Dildoween in a while. I’m a Dildoween fan.

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"Dissident Right" is actually the older term, used in magazines like The American Conservative to describe those who opposed the Iraq War. I remember when Spencer proposed the "alt right" movement based on volkish black metal bands, and I thought that was stupid.

> 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

No, most voters are old. That's the reason Joe Biden won.

> we all began tweeting #cuckservative at every doughy NRO columnist and pink-cheeked chamber of commerce type we could find

And you seem to think that actually made any difference? Biden was not the candidate of twitter, but twitter is not real life.

> Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right”

It's a terrible idea when the left adopts a "no enemies to the left" position, because oftentimes your purported allies are actually the problem and require punching.

> hammering certain memes and brainworms into everyone’s head: “shift the Overton Window”

Stemming from a misunderstanding of the Overton Window.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-myth-of-the-overton-window

> These memes got people to stop thinking so much about object-level policies

Again, a terrible idea if you actually care about policies rather than viewing politics as substance-free entertainment. Not that I believe your memes actually accomplished this (most people are already too dumb to be knowledgeable about policies).

> IMO allowed us to maintain a certain level of message discipline and tactical coherence

"Message discipline" is one of the last things I'd associate with social media trolls. They revolt at the idea of discipline, wanting to be punk iconoclasts. I'd link to Yglesias on how this applies to the left, but I expect your tolerance for him is low enough that the mere mention of him is irritating.

> This might make me seem intellectually promiscuous or flaky, but understand we were all in ideological flux back then

That's you projecting. I doubt Kevin MacDonald was in flux.

> Obviously that was a very braindead take.

Is it really that far beow your average?

> Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS

With no help from internet rightists, mainstream legal conservatives had been working on that for a long time and the precedent permitting it was on shaky ground from the beginning.

> 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

A DSA meeting is precisely the kind of place you'd be required to preface any statement that way.

> We won too much here!

Have you actually changed anything about immigration or gender norms?

> It seemed that by 2020 most sincere Zionists (particularly the younger ones) stopped seeing a potential Shoah

And you think something called "The Daily Shoah" helped with that?

> Seriously, if any of you wignats worked in tech this would be your real concern.

I was working in tech before your timeline here even began. I've worked with plenty of immigrants over that time. And I'm with Garett Jones on the subject: we should be selectively bringing in more immigrants whose Culture Transplant improves the Hive Mind.

> n 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.

I endorsed Paul's isolationism, but I was never dumb enough to blame "Zionists" for his marginalization. He was called "Doctor No" because he was the only dissenter on LOTS of legislation.

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I suppose this is thread necromancy, but Jonathan Chait is correct here (with the same logic applying to any political coalition): https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/in-defense-of-punching-left.html

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> That's the reason Joe Biden won.

That reason would be election fraud.

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This is possibly true, but not known to be true.

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In the same sense that Epstein "possibly" didn't killed himself.

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In a *similar* sense....but if you parse that with precision, it has very little power in fact (but then, appearances are what matter here in 2024).

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How did Trump win in 2016 when he didn't have any executive branch powers?

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Trump was even more popular than the left expected and so they hadn't prepared enough fraudulent votes ahead of time, then Hillary lacked either the will or ability to pull the trigger on post-election fraud.

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Yikes, buddy, this is a bit delusional, even for me.

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Obama was in charge of the executive branch, so shouldn't it have been up to him?

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Elections in the US are generally managed at the local level.

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And the Democrats took over swing states in that time period?

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Strongly disagree with Bismarck.

The good points of "redpilling" were inherent in the logic of the situation - falling fertility (due to liberalism, modernity, feminism, etc.) leading to mass immigration and multiculturalism, etc., leading to a radical backlash/critique of the West. All this was on the cards anyway and had to be done with intelligence and discipline to have an optimum effect.

What the Alt-Right did "succeed" in doing was turning this healthy and inevitable impulse down a seedy back ally and finally into a sewer, thanks to idiots like Spencer, half prompted/ co-opted by various kinds of "gay ops."

Meanwhile much of the so-called "redpilling" has deteriorated into oversimplistic decontextualised, LARPy paranoia, anti-Semitism, and in some cases actual mental insanity with almost zero effective political mobilisation.

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Thank you for the comment, it's good to hear from you.

I would argue that what already existed prior to the Alt Right in WN 1.0 was much more of a "seedy back ally" than anything Spencer or Mike Enoch mobilized in 2016. We temporarily rehabilitated and laundered WN ideas by associating them with educated and attractive young people, and this made Soft WN appealing to normies in Middle America.

After heilgate Spencer started to lose both normie and elite support and miscalculated by marching around with white trash, but this didn't really hurt us long term. Today Spencer has basically rehabilitated himself on Twitter and Fuentes et al were able to keep Soft WN alive in mainstream MAGA discourse. Because of this white people are seeing real victories in affirmative action etc.

Of course it isn't everything the intellectual leadership of the movement wanted, but for the average young prowhite it feels like things are getting a lot better.

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Today small channels with a thousand views tops, like a bronski, espouse intellectual views, these are absorbed by guys like me who repeat them in the ears of somewhat larger influencers like a, sellner, striker, or whatever, these then then start being accepted to the wider vanguard and start influencing twitter conversations, about a month after a term is coined by the first intellectuals, deemed good enough by the overseer's, introduced to vanguard leaders and their cohort, it has been handed down far enough that it dominates standard politics.

Intellectual planner> intellectual overseer> vanguard leader> vanguard fighters/activists> the masses we influence and have brought in through constant pravda barrages.

We have a efficient chain of distribution, but i must critique our intellectual planners on lacking actionable visions to spread.

And even a lacking of awareness of what they wield.

There's probably only a few thousand people who belong to group 2 and a hundred who belong to group 1 and a hundred to group 3.

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Well done on creating the next generation that will at some point require a resounding defeat from the normies of the world, who usually don’t like to have to feel strongly about anything…. But when they do…

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This is very superficial. The Alt Right didn't succeed because of its "radicalism and intensity"—it succeeded because of its CONVENTIONAL premises. You think racism and nationalism are some kind of radical ideas? More like 99% of the ideas held by human beings throughout history. From the primordial days of small nomadic tribes to the Ancient societies and the mass slaughterhouses of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Communism and fascism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, derived from the mystical dogmatism of the three monotheistic religions.

The mixed economy was always a temporary political state. It had two ways moving forward: totalitarianism (theocracy/racist-nationalism) or freedom. The first was the most probable because of the dominance of collectivism and altruism (secularized Christian ethics) in the culture. Rejecting the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis was always going to be a generational task, and it may destroy the West (the idea, not a geography) completely before humanity can reemerge with a Second Renaissance via the contra axis of reason-egoism-individualism.

As for your pathetic, loser racist mentality, I'll do best by quoting Ayn Rand: "A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin."

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Thoughts on bitcoin?

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I was curious about it a few years ago but never got into it myself and don't have anything interesting to say about it, other than it's too inconvenient to use as actual currency unless you are a criminal or ideologue.

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Figured I'd ask since you mention concern about the dollar's status as world reserve currency. Many bitcoin proponents argue that its purpose is to serve as an alternative to the dollar.

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the point of preserving the dollar is to give America more of an ability to export inflation abroad and artificially prop up our living standards relative to Germany etc. while letting us run crazy deficits

btc is more about preserving individual purchasing power

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Gross.

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Hell yeah, buddy! Propagate that Nazi rhetoric! (sorry I impregnated an asian chick.)

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Interesting article, but I don't understand how deleting white people from history explains anything – to blacks or anyone else. I haven't seen Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton but from what I've gleaned online every white person is now a black person except for the bad guy.

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This is priceless. It's like parody, but *real*.

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Why do you dislike Indians?

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They ain't White, duh.

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This is beautifully and yet crisply written.

The 'Vitalist' label is sort of...already taken.

'prairie hobbit sensibilities' haha very nice

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Thank you fam.

I am pissed about the vitalist thing, I was certain that was an original idea lol. But I suppose it was too obvious a name to not have been taken by someone.

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This article/writing project feels like a brazen attempt to coopt something you have little claim to, for divergent present day goals, however one feels about either side of that equation. Also as cringe and insufferable as the “dissident right” is, its cope to pretend that the alt right achieved everything and its successor achieved nothing. Where was white identity at in 2018 versus today? Thats a bit like a 2000s libertarian saying the libertarian wave did everything to engender right wing distrust of the security state while the alt right did almost nothing. It’s very easy to lionise a countercultural political movement once its long dead, but not so easy to navigate a live one.

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