Hunter Wallace is Wrong

...and probably didn't read my article

Yesterday the esteemed Hunter Wallace at Occidental Dissent published an article entitled Alt-Right 2.0 Is a Terrible Idea.

I was hoping this piece would respond to some of the arguments I’d made in my initial call for an Alt Right 2.0, but I’m not sure Wallace even read my original essay. In none of his fifteen points of criticism does he bother responding to any of my ideas.

Instead he dedicates most of his article to complaining about Richard Spencer, which is a bizarre move because Richard Spencer isn’t involved with the project.

It’s true Daniella Pentsak and I became interested in an Alt Right 2.0 after reminiscing about the movement with Richard on his Alexandria podcast, but Spencer himself was lukewarm about the idea and explicitly said he’s going in a totally different direction. He wants to be a cultural critic and esoteric religious theorist, not a movement leader, and we understand and respect that choice.

For this reason I’m not going to dwell much on Wallace’s critiques of Spencer’s leadership in Points 1-7 of his article. I honestly can’t even assess how legit most of them are, because I never participated in any IRL political action, and was mostly irrelevant by the time people started to do so en masse in 2017.

That said, I have zero interest in adopting tactics from the 2017-2018 AR, and in my capacity as a leader of Alt Right 2.0 will discourage others from doing so.

I am interested in reviving the spirit of 2016 and especially 2015—the period in which I was a public figure and the Alt Right’s tactical choices were overwhelmingly correct.

As such, Wallace’s third point forces me to dispense some anti-Occidents:

3. Cultivating Liberal Journos – Richard Spencer had a bizarre obsession with cultivating liberal journalists like Elle Reeve and Rosie Gray. This led to fiasco after fiasco that steadily deflated and winnowed the movement: Heilgate, Charlottesville III when Spencer returned to Charlottesville with a CNN camera crew after the Unite the Right rally, the New York Times expose of Eli Mosley’s stolen valor, etc.

The coda to Alt-Right 1.0 was the interview that Spencer gave to Elle Reeve during the Charlottesville trial when even she appeared to be baffled by his lack concern for the well being of the people who came to his events. “It should have just been about Richard Spencer” summed up the whole era.

Literally no one was attracted to the movement because Spencer was reaching converts on CNN or constantly sucking up to liberal reporters from The Atlantic, BuzzFeed or VICE News.

This take is retarded.

During 2015-2017 I personally met and befriended dozens of people (including several guys who became respected movement leaders and content creators) who were exposed to the AR through mainstream articles about Spencer.

They were generally liberals by upbringing and temperament who had grown attracted to our ideas because they found Spencer’s theater kid energy charismatic and his rhetorical style compelling. They were the same type of person who came into the movement through my Disney parodies, or through figures like Millennial Woes.

I think Wallace’s view is distorted because it’s unquestionably true that Spencer didn’t bring in many guys named “Hunter” who enjoy this aesthetic:

But guys like this weren’t the core of the 2015 Alt Right.

Most of us were rebellious nerds and hipsters from liberal families. Our tastes and sensibilities were not those of Middle America, and that’s what brought in lots of educated young people outside the traditional Republican coalition. Spencer was an excellent representative of this cohort, and his cultivation of liberal journos played a big role in attracting more of them.

In 2015 and early-mid 2016 he was a perfect leader for us. By 2017 he was no longer an appropriate leader, because the Alt Right had become a lot more temperamentally conservative as it interfaced with the Alt Light and MAGA. This was something all of us welcomed at the time, as it polarized American society and shifted the Overton Window to accommodate our ideas, and in retrospect it was probably good overall.

But the cost of this maneuver was filling the Alt Right with a bunch of guys from Kansas who called Spencer a faggot. These people basically look control of the movement and started to define our online presence, aesthetics, and tactics on the ground. And when Spencer was no longer opening doors for them and had become too toxic, they loudly and aggressively repudiated him.

Spencer certainly made a lot of unforced errors during the “second half” of the AR, starting very notably with Heilgate. But he made those mistakes precisely because he was the type of person who could win so many converts and deliver so many unqualified victories in the first half of the movement.

He’s certainly a complicated man. But it takes a unique mind to lead any radical or countercultural movement, and you always need to accept the bad with the good. Instead WNs treated Spencer the same way black people treated Kanye West—loved the guy when his star burned bright, abandoned him the moment it burned hot. Lame.

Anyway, Spencer wasn’t the right guy to lead the Alt Right in 2017, but I’m not sure who would have done better. Maybe Jared Taylor minus twenty years and plus a billion dollars. Or Batman. Everyone else would have done worse.

That’s because the movement didn’t have much of a purpose by that point. Trump had won and everything depended on whether he’d spoken to Bannon or Kushner more recently. If anything, we should have just become an online pressure group that exerted pressure on the administration and executed propaganda campaigns with surgical precision (It’s Okay To Be White was one fantastic example of this).

But it’s easy for me to say that as a middle aged man. At the time I was 23 and thought Based Stick Man was cool. It felt like we had momentum and should stand our ground against Antifa, and I definitely wasn’t about to countersignal the guys showing up IRL when I was still anon. There was simply an ENORMOUS appetite among the Millennial rank and file for IRL activism, and if the Xer leadership like Spencer/Enoch had tried to suppress this, our cohort might have just propped up one of our own and done the same exact shit.

I’m not sure there’s any alternate history where 2017 goes better for the Alt Right.

Anyway, I’m building AR2 and not Spencer, so let’s skip the hate and move to Point 8:

8. Negative Definitions – The Alt-Right defined itself as a big tent space outside the pre-Trump Conservatism, Inc. consensus. It was originally a space where White Nationalists rubbed shoulders with paleoconservatives and libertarians in the George W. Bush era. It was conceived as a means for White Nationalists to reach a larger audience. If there was anything of substance at the core of the original Alt-Right, it was White Nationalism or what Richard Spencer called Identitarianism.

In 2024, the contrarians who want to give “Alt-Right 2.0” a whirl have abandoned White Nationalism and Identitarianism. Paleoconservatism is ascendant. Reactionaries are influential. Libertarians have a voice in Congress. White identity politics is increasingly mainstream meat and potatoes discourse on the Right. National Socialists remain as marginalized as ever. There is no longer any ossified conservative establishment to challenge like the tottering dinosaur that was Reaganism in 2012.

By defining itself in purely negative terms against True Conservatism, the incoherent Alt-Right was always destined to disintegrate once those people were toppled from power. There is no need for an Alt-Right or Dissident Right when White identity politics is simply the Online Right in 2024.

Here Hunter once again loses track of his prey, failing to address the most important argument in my article. In the second passage of Alt Right 2.0 I state the following:

What was it that made the Alternative Right different from the normie right in 2015? In what respects were we actually “alternative?”

It certainly wasn’t racism. Normie conservatives are very racist and always have been. Their racism is just unsystematic and incoherent. Everyone has an uncle who talks like George Wallace after a few beers but then passionately supports Tim Scott (or Herman Cain or Ben Carson) because he orgasms whenever a black person agrees with him. All of our dads love YouTube videos where a conservative black guy yells at other black people for being “thugs” while eating a chicken sandwich in his car.

It’s true we were explicitly White Nationalist in a way normies weren’t. We wanted to maintain a consistent worldview, which often meant “biting the bullet” to embrace difficult conclusions that scared people far more hateful or bigoted than us on an instinctive level. But I think this gets at a more fundamental difference in temperament that was a lot more significant.

With Alt Right 2.0 I am building a space on the Right (here meaning a political tradition that respects hierarchy, prosocial struggle, and social vitality) for people who don’t come from a traditional conservative background and don’t have a typical conservative temperament.

I want to attract educated, thoughtful, and creative young people who can solve the Right’s enormous human capital problem (see Hanania’s excellent piece) and generate a leadership class to staff our institutions and produce art better than God’s Not Dead.

That means I want to appeal to coastal elites—people with a serious education, who aren’t attracted to Middle American sensibilities or aesthetics, and who roll their eyes at maudlin apple pie constitution Hallmark Movie shit.

I am not trying to attract Hunter Wallace.

I have absolutely nothing against the guy—we were probably Twitter friends in the old days, and I’m sure he’s a good man with a high IQ and charming personality and dashing good looks and beautiful family. But the movement I’m building simply isn’t designed for him or people who think like him.

That is how we are “Alternative”. It is a deep and substantive difference. We have a positive vision for who we are, and are not “defining ourselves negatively” at all.

If that criticism applies to anyone, it’s normie conservatives (and particularly MAGA), who are ideologically vacuous and driven by nothing but prole resentment at the bottom and huckster nihilism at the top. At least the Tea Party had some kind of civicmindedness and intellectual consistency—MAGA is nothing but cynical Will to Power and animal instinct to “own the libs”. Purely negative.

It’s a repulsive movement that honestly deserves to be destroyed and humiliated. But Neo-Cons and Liberals are worse, so I’ll vote Trump all the same this November and hope these chuds burn themselves out over the next four years. Then in 2028 there will be a huge appetite for real administrative competence and intellectual rigor, and perhaps then Alt Right 2.0 can get behind a GOP primary candidate.

Until then I am perfectly fine (and actually prefer) to remain a marginal movement for marginal people. I want to build a culture that optimizes for generating true and useful ideas instead of winning elections and “redpilling the normies”.

The Alt Right 2.0 will exercise influence among elites by creating good art that provokes meaningful discussion, and by sending white papers to politicos, staffers, and mischievous tech CEOs. We have precisely nothing to gain from talking to Huskers Fans who will make us pretend to care about abortion etc.

Hunter ends Point 8 with the following:

There is no need for an Alt-Right or Dissident Right when White identity politics is simply the Online Right in 2024.

This is exactly why we need an Alt Right 2.0.

The first iteration basically succeeded in its goals, as I argued in my Alt Right Retrospective. We normalized white identity politics in conservative spaces; that was unquestionably a good thing and is why I stopped calling myself a white nationalist.

But in doing this we also unleashed some horrible tendencies in the American Right—nihilism, cynicism, vacuous Trump worship, misogyny, and religious extremism. Those impulses are what the second iteration is going to combat.

We can’t put the beast back in its cage at this point, but we can show what the alternative looks like to smart and curious young people who don’t want to be liberals but are disgusted by modern conservatives.

Onward to Point 9:

9. Pseudo-Intellectuals, Dandies and Dilettantes – Far from offering “intellectual seriousness,” Alt-Right 1.0 is remarkable for producing virtually nothing of intellectual substance, and particularly Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers. The lowbrow popular version of the Alt-Right on 4chan, YouTube, Daily Stormer and TRS was even less intellectual.

Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis did all the heavy lifting in fleshing out a nationalist vision and political agenda. Jared Taylor and the race realists like J. Philippe Rushton were around long before the Alt-Right. Identitarianism was borrowed from the European New Right. Peter Brimelow and VDARE had been pushing for immigration restriction since the 1990s. Even the accelerationist mass shooters were inspired by James Mason’s SIEGE. Spencer gestured at vague Nietzschean platitudes.

This is basically just snobbery over medium.

Ryan Faulk and Sean Last’s YouTube videos were easily more rigorous than most formal academic scholarship, and the wider community surrounding them produced thousands of enormously substantive video essays, debates, etc. This content was highly intellectual, and influenced millions of smart and creative young people. It was certainly not just rehashed Francis and Rushton.

The problem is that if you don’t put your idea in a book, journal article, or white paper it won’t be taken as seriously for entirely vapid reasons. More crucially, it won’t necessarily have staying power, and it’s easy for people to plagiarize you or mutilate / censor your thoughts with a line item veto. To some extent this happened to the AR in 2018-2022 as prowhite ideas disseminated in much dumber and uglier forms throughout the Alt Lite and MAGA.

For this reason I actually do think Spencer should have written a book or two during this period, but he was probably too busy with activism.

I won’t make the same mistake with AR2. I’m starting with longform content here on Substack so I have a corpus of essays that can be collated into a book and serve as the basis for our new movement. Eventually I’ll form a thinktank that publishes the kind of literature deemed respectable and serious by the august blogger Mr. Wallace. But that’s a long term goal (which my dear reader can expedite by becoming a paychad).

Next to Point 10:

10. The Lowbrow Alt-Right – In its heyday, Alt-Right 1.0 was known for Nazi toilet humor, gas chamber memes, trolling journos on Twitter, sonnenrads, Pepe the Frog, anime, Kekistan flags and parody songs, not original groundbreaking ideas. When this culture came offline into the real world, it produced gladiators like Based Stick Man. Ten years later, most people who were amused by that have matured. It looks juvenile and ephemeral to grown men who are now in their late thirties and forties.

Is it all Richard Spencer’s fault?

No, he is simply a rich target. He also isn’t wrong about a lot of things

Late thirties and forties? Try late twenties and thirties, grandpa.

But I mostly agree with this, which is why I’m taking things in a different direction with Alt Right 2.0. Crude racism never belongs in public, and the gas chamber memes etc. (which I myself never trafficked in) should be left in the dustbin of history.

But we absolutely shouldn’t abandon satire or memes—without those things you simply won’t attract smart young people. We should just have higher standards for them and demand a greater degree of subtlety and artistic depth. Thankfully, AI tools like Dall-E and Suno let us produce much better memes than we ever could in 2016:

Today the world can appreciate my lyrical genius without ever having to suffer through my awful singing, and that’s going to open a lot of doors for compelling art.

Trolling Twitter journos is likewise an unbridled good if you keep it subtle and high verbal IQ like Hanania. There are lots of hilarious and socially beneficial ways to piss off people you hate while maintaining plausible deniability. We just can’t let in temperamentally conservative people because they are too straightforward in their rhetoric, and their idea of “trolling liberal journos” is sending Ezra Klein oven memes.

On to Point 11:

11. Incels – In Spencer’s view, he was slumming with losers and ankle biters – low status White men who are incapable of attracting women – who brought him down in Charlottesville and pushed him aside in its wake. He tried to lead those people. He more or less jumped in front of the crowd and tried to ride the wave in an effort to become famous. There is a kernel of truth to this.

While Richard Spencer had created the original Alternative Right website, he quickly lost interest in the project and had a bitter falling out with his colleagues. He ditched the Alternative Right in favor of Radix Journal and hosting NPI conferences. The true social base of the 2015/2016 Alt-Right emerged out of Gamergate and was centered on 4chan and cultivated by Daily Stormer and TRS.

There really was an insurrection against Spencer after Charlottesville that was led by angry manlet types like Weev, Beardson Beardly, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Anglin. Those people also took over the main body of the movement in 2018 and increasingly defined it in terms of their resentments about women. Weev would post psychotic rants about his desire to beat and rape women. Andrew Anglin spent years celebrating Elliot Rodger. Fuentes would come on his show and talk about burning women at the stake.

In retrospect, why would anyone want to go down the same road again in light of how it turned out? This is another reason why we don’t need an Alt-Right 2.0. At a time when White identity politics is increasingly mainstream, why would you want to attract legions of bitter, marginal, sexually frustrated losers? Spencer is correct that to a large degree this is what the movement always was.

Agree with all of this. I don’t want incels and low status men in my movement.

That’s why to join AR2 you'll need to be at least 5’10. We’ll keep a measuring tape outside the door and shoo away manlets like with the Brown Paper Bag Test.

Let’s also reject anyone over Norwood 3 and guys who earn less than $120k / year.

Point 12:

12. Censorship – Alt-Right 1.0 rose and fell with the tides of social media censorship on Twitter and YouTube. As with the pre-Trump conservative establishment, the conditions which facilitated the rise of the original movement no longer exist. It is a different world now.

Bizarre, out of touch take.

2024 feels very similar to 2014-2015 to me. That’s literally why I came back. Substack and Elon’s Twitter have made it possible to have interesting conversations again and basically vanquished cancel culture.

And as a result the intellectual environment on the Right has become tremendously open and generative. People are practically begging for hot takes and bold new ideas, which is why Hanania has been so wildly successful and I’ve made such a splash on Substack over the past few weeks.

This is precisely the right time to start an exciting and interesting new movement.

13. Third Reich Nostalgia – I’m tired of rebrands.

White Nationalism was a rebrand. The Alt-Right was a rebrand. Identitarianism was a rebrand. The Dissident Right was a rebrand. As the TRS / NJP saga shows, no list of why Alt-Right 1.0 failed would be complete without bringing up the cycle of how the movement always returns to its origins of George Lincoln Rockwell trolling the normies on a street corner.  

The movement is like an alcoholic. After a major failure or collapse, it will sober up, rebrand and promise to be a new me. A new guy will come along who will promise good optics and success in mainstream politics. A few years later, the same guy will be throwing up Roman salutes or praising Hitler. Everyone in the organization will turn on everyone else. See NJP and America First.

Yeah, I’m not promising “good optics and success in mainstream politics.”

If anything I want to alienate normies and piss off conservatives. I endorse Hanania’s strategy of punching at low IQ incels and Nazis. I want guys who drive pickups to call me a faggot, and I want as many people to see that as possible, because that’s how you build credibility with urban coastal elites, intellectuals, and artists.

It gets your foot in the door to promote hierarchical / vitalist ideas in your art, privately build knowledge of HBD to intellectually undermine affirmative action among centrists, and discredit the worst excesses of mainstream politics (i.e. Hanania’s broadside on Civil Rights law).

14. Antisocial Personality Types – I can already hear it now.

Sure, White identity politics is increasingly mainstream. The taboo on criticizing Israel is beginning to erode. Immigration restriction couldn’t be more mainstream. Nationalism is no longer the preserve of edgelords. Pretty much everything we used to say we wanted has gained traction.

But … CHRISTIANITY IS A JEWISH PLOT.

For lots of people who were involved in Alt-Right 1.0, the marginalization was the point. Being a fringe edgelord was their whole reason for getting involved in the scene in the first place. Political success and normalization is by definition the worst possible outcome for these types. They were in it to shock the normies or for the contrarian hot takes. They enjoyed being outrageous.

Outrageousness has a low ceiling. We need the support of boring, normal people.

What boring, normal people? Do you mean the ones who stormed the capital?

Normie Christian conservatives are the ones acting outrageous and out of control right now. It would honestly benefit these kulaks to spend a few years in Gitmo.

If anyone is “boring and normal” these days it’s Richard Spencer, who’s embraced the Gen X grillpill and spends his days reviewing Depeche Mode albums. Sure, he loves his contrarian hot takes. So does Matt Yglesias. Hell, the two of them basically have the same worldview at this point. To anyone who doesn’t recognize him from 2016, Spencer comes off like a CNN host or the coolest dad at a Boston PTA meeting.

Look, guys who spit contrarian hot takes aren’t “antisocial”. We just hate circlejerks and womanly consensus building. We poke at pressure points, asymmetries, inconsistencies, frictions, and unfortunate implications. This really pisses off low openness chuds because it reduces social cohesion and isn’t good for building an institution. But you need people like Spencer and me and Hanania to prevent your ideology from growing vacuous and stale and boring, as has very obviously happened to the DR / MAGA / broader populist Right.

We also point out more subtle weaknesses and vulnerabilities the Left doesn’t want to call attention to because it would hurt them for us to fix those things. Conservatives don’t realize this because they are mostly very weak in verbal and social intelligence, and generally don’t understand things like cultural coding and subtext.

Finally we come to Point 15:

15. Contrarians – This brings me to the contrarians who want an Alt-Right 2.0.

These people have an itch to scratch. They are driven by an impulse, not an ideology. When neocons were the conservative establishment, they were for White Nationalism, HBD, populism, anti-globalism, immigration restriction and so on. But today, they have rejected White Nationalism and HBD and want free trade, mass immigration, a neocon foreign policy to weaken Russia, etc.

He’s not entirely wrong about this, but this isn’t a bad thing.

If our poor wayward Hunter had actually read my original essay, he’d know AR2 is very deliberately not focused on ideology so much as temperament and character.

I certainly have my own technocratic platform that I’d like to see adopted, but object-level issues aren’t as important to me as metapolitics and basic civics. The primary objective is to build a space on the Right for educated people with taste and a general respect for honesty and intellectual rigor.

This is what Hunter means by us having “an itch to scratch”. He is thinking about the world purely in terms of ideologies and platforms and issue sets, but I reject that vision. Sometimes a nation needs free trade, sometimes it needs protectionism. Sometimes it needs mass immigration, sometimes it needs extreme restriction. Purism about these things is almost always childish and wrongheaded.

I’m more about generally promoting hierarchy, vitality, and prosocial conflict. That’s why I’m “Alt Right” and not “Alt Center”.

I will have changing opinions on the issues of the day as demanded by changing circumstances and coalitional pressures, but I will always be more focused on things like who’s in charge, who defines the rules of debate, how rules are adjusted if necessary, how disagreements are adjudicated, how losers can relitigate past failures, how flexibly policy can pivot in response to change on the ground, how political actors define friend vs. enemy, etc. Those metapolitical factors are infinitely more interesting to me than something like, say, abortion.

I don’t know about you.

I’m too old for this though.

Finally something we agree on!

My two sons are Generation Alpha.

I want them to grow up in a world where pro-White politics has been normalized. Winning metapolitical battles on the Right also isn’t enough. It is a small consolation prize. The ship is still sinking even if some conservatives are grudgingly coming around to our point of view.

We can’t afford to spend another decade goofing off and shooting ourselves in the foot. Trolling epileptic libs with strobe lights on Twitter is great for giggles, but we have work to do.

Your sons are growing up in a world where normie conservatives keep threatening to overthrow the government and start a Civil War that will immiserate millions. It’s the contrarian Richard Spencer who constantly rails against this poisonous instinct.

Your sons probably won’t have access to Social Security because normie conservative Boomers are too selfish to accept any reform. It’s the contrarian Richard Hanania who pushes back against gerontocracy and the meatheaded populist maximalism of MAGA luminaries like JD Vance.

Your sons are faced with a cultural, intellectual, and administrative elite that is overwhelmingly hostile to them, and mainstream conservatives are doing everything in their power to make this problem worse by adopting and encouraging behaviors and sensibilities that are repulsive to smart and creative young people.

It’s the contrarian Walt Bismarck who’s trying to fix this by creating an alternative right wing space that Zoomers and Alphas will find inspirational and cool.

Hunter Wallace is a smart guy, but he’s probably too old and out of touch to get it.

And that’s fine. In a few years his sons will bring him on board.