I want to build an Alt Right 2.0

It's time we rehabilitate an ingenious and glorious brand.

**UPDATE**- This piece is of historical interest only. These days I have subsumed this project into The Walt Right.

I was recently a guest on Richard Spencer’s Alexandria podcast, where I had a fantastic conversation with him and fellow guest Daniella Pentsak.

About halfway through the call we began to discuss the history of the Alt Right, and this generated significant insight into the successes, failures, and lessons of 2016.

Walking away from this call I felt the need to reassess my own goals on this platform and in politics generally. Eventually I came to a crucial realization:

We need to bring back the Alt Right.

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“Alt Right” was an amazing brand that did us a lot of favors when we emerged on the scene in 2015, and it still holds power today.

A big part of this was that it just feels good to say “Alt Right.” It has a crisp and punchy mouthfeel. The tight conglomeration of consonants connotes vigor and assertiveness. And there’s something very confident and masculine about only needing two syllables to express who you are. Parsimony is power.

“Dissident Right” sucks ass in comparison. It takes twice as long to say, which codes as unconfident and effete. Also its most powerful consonant is the aspirated “s” sound, which people associate with gays and makes “dissident” sound like “sissy”.

Calling yourself a “dissident” feels very insecure and even passive-aggressive. With this label you basically cancel yourself preemptively, which is idiotic in the environment Hanania et al have created in 2024.

It reminds me of when I was first applying for jobs and my instinct was to not apply for positions where I didn’t meet the “qualifications”. My mom taught me that was a sucker move—”let them disqualify you, never disqualify yourself.” Precisely the same principle applies here.

Also, against whom are you even dissenting these days? Ross Douthat? John Podhoretz? The ghost of Bill Buckley? Nikki Haley?

The simple fact is there are no dissidents on the right anymore, and this nomenclature only scares people into censoring themselves and speaking too carefully as though we were still in the Before Times.

Pretty much all intelligent young conservatives know the score at this point, and you’re not getting any CPAC pussy calling yourself “Dissident Right” in 2024. That Heritage intern you’re trying to impress is probably much fashier than you are.

At this point the main thing lacking on the Right isn’t bravery or a sufficient desire to “own the libs”. Normie conservatives already have that in spades. They are practically revolutionary at this point, and if anything we need to calm these chuds down.

What’s missing is intellectual seriousness. It’s the ability to stand up to our own side and tell them they’re acting retarded. It’s the ability to not get co-opted by MAGA and other populist grifters who’ll try to “yes, and” our ideas into irrelevance.

That’s where Alt Right 2.0 has a role to play. We aren’t valuable because we are “dissenting” against the Neo-Cons or even MAGA. We’re valuable because we are transcending this dialectic and providing an entirely different perspective—an alternative perspective for the Right.

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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.

I wrote about this in my alt right retrospective:

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. 

In other words, we were weirdos. Nerds and hipsters and a few cringe theater kids like yours truly. In personality and background the average person in the AR was a lot closer to your average liberal than your average conservative.

And this is what enabled people like Richard Spencer to generate so much positive press for the movement in 2015 and 2016. He knew how to talk to liberal journalists because he came from their world and could speak their language. The same thing applied to most of the Alt Right commentariat on Twitter and YouTube, virtually all of whom were highly educated and intellectually generative.

But this also created an enormous tension with the populist movement we had aligned ourselves with. At its core, MAGA was advocating for the interests of the sort of people who called us faggots in high school. Blue collar people, “good and normal” white people in the Midwest who like to grill, people who enjoy lawns and cars and hot dogs, the sort of guy who regularly drops n-bombs but swears he “doesn’t care if your skin is purple or green, as long as you work!”

When these people look at Richard Spencer, they see a liberal queer. They always will. It doesn’t matter how many metapolitical doors he kicks down for them. It doesn’t matter if he helps them take over the Republican Party and kick out the globalists who fucked them with NAFTA. These chuds just don’t like people who dress and talk like that. They don’t want people to engage with big ideas. They want us to shut up and grill and go to church and cheer for the Huskers.

Thankfully Spencer was tall and handsome and from old money, so he had a lot of confidence in who he was, and nobody could really pressure him into being anything less. This is what made him “leader of the Alt Right”.

But as the movement attracted more normal “heritage conservatives” in 2016, pretty much all of the other leaders and content creators from 2015 started to act more in line with the preferences of Middle America. The rhetoric became more folksy, pedestrian, and respectful of the ordinary. Software engineers and graduate students and thinktank guys started talking like truckers and plumbers.

And that’s what killed us.

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The Alt Right used to lambast GOP establishment Heritage / Koch types for not “taking their own side” and supporting White Nationalism. But in a sense the #cuckservatives were taking their own side, because like us they had more in common with elite liberals than heartland conservatives. The cucks were just much more agreeable than us, so they felt less of an urge to buck the trend on race and ethnicity.

But because of the horribly antiwhite racial environment of 2015 we saw GOP cucks as our main enemy. We quickly became a kind of intellectual vanguard against them in support of the interests of normie white people—the kind of people the GOP establishment would openly mock. We became so fixated on defeating the GOPe that we lost sight of the fact that we had even less in common with Middle America.

This problem was exacerbated once Trump won the GOP nomination and the lines separating the Alt Right from the Alt Light and MAGA started to blur. In many ways we benefited from this dynamic, as this is what caused the broader Right to adopt our ideas. But it also completely destroyed our reputation for erudition and thoughtfulness among elite liberals, and this drove us into a cultural ghetto from which we’d never emerge.

I don’t want to relitigate history and play the blame game. We were all swept up in the energy of the time and were much younger back then. I endorsed the populist big tent strategy Spencer and Enoch adopted and played a big part in carrying it out online, so it would be stupid for me to counter-signal it now. And we can’t deny that it paid long-term dividends for us by shifting the Overton Window. These days it’s very easy to talk about HBD and white interests, and that’s largely because of our hard work.

I am much more interested in the future, and to that end it’s clear that populism won’t do us any good. Talking to normies is pointless because they don’t think in terms of systems or narratives, only tribal loyalties and immediate material carrots and sticks. We unleashed the beast that is MAGA and it did a great job devouring intransigent neocons and goofy tea partiers, but it has since become uncontrollable, and the only appropriate tactic is to disengage until it tires itself out.

It's important to understand that MAGA conservatives aren’t interested in ideas or policy. They are completely incoherent and wholly in hock to the Orange Man, who is himself totally unpredictable. Trying to form a long-term strategy for practical politics doesn’t make sense when so much stems from whether Trump watches Tucker or Hannity on a given night.

That’s not to say we should disengage entirely. People like Rufo are doing amazing things, and even DeSantis might have some more tricks up his sleeve. I’m also not completely hopeless about a second Trump administration. If Project 2025 is actually successful and some serious people get in real positions of power I will absolutely change my tune. But again, everything is far too contingent on the actions of one very selfish and very unpredictable man for me to get my hopes up.

The way I see it, it’s currently impossible for anything interesting to happen on the Right at the level of mass politics because Trump sucks up all the oxygen. If people want to try to influence him I certainly wish them well, and will work with them to the best of my ability, but it doesn’t seem all that likely to succeed to me. I plan to vote for him this November, but that’s because I want him to go away as fast as possible.

So long as Trump is in office or actively running, I want the Alt Right 2.0 to exist completely outside the conservative bubble. And not as an oppositional force per se, but as a genuine alternative—a place for more educated and thoughtful rightists who believe in hierarchy and vitality but are disgusted with the incoherence, callousness, and grifter mindset of conservative elites.

The distinction with MAGA will thus emerge from temperament, not ideology. Ideologically we will be a big tent, and I want to make room for all kinds of people and engage with all sorts of fellow travelers. I will always talk to pretty much anyone.

But we must be consciously elitist—this needs to be a movement of educated and thoughtful people who enjoy challenging art and appreciate novelty and weirdness. We must be a movement of people who enjoy nuance and accept that the world is a messy and complicated place that won’t always make sense or conform to preestablished heuristics. Without this we aren’t “alternative” in any real sense.

We also need a culture that aggressively bullies away incels and other resentful / aggressive low status men who scare away women and bite at the ankles of leaders and content creators. These people don’t contribute anything and bring down the vibe for everyone. Creative people need to operate in an open and exuberant environment that encourages them to take risks, not one where they’re constantly trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator or are afraid of being called cringe or degenerate or gay. Too much tolerance for this type of person is in my opinion the main thing that brought down Alt Right 1.0. “Not punching right” on ideology is a good thing, but mean and aggressive twerps must always be ostracized.

For the immediate future, I think it makes most sense to view Alt Right 2.0 as a kind of social club, informal thinktank, and professional network. Like the Proto Alt Right of 2010-2014, it should be a fairly loose ecosystem of contrarians and free thinkers who disagree on a lot of things and don’t try to build a consensus or establish a hierarchy. Hot takes should be lionized and circlejerks demonized. The goal should be to brainstorm and theorycraft and shape the intellectual development of younger Zoomer and older Gen Alpha kids coming into the world. I think of how Ryan Faulk influenced me in 2011, and want to play the same role for the next Walt Bismarck.

This work will not be glamorous and nobody will become a celebrity this year like Richard was eight years ago. It will mostly look like a bunch of middle aged men writing essays at each other and hopefully inspiring some cohort of autistic teenagers into making TikToks about our ideas. It will seem like a sideshow to those in power, but a lot of thinktank guys and Trump staffers will be tuning in. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of our luminaries play a similar role to the one Matt Yglesias has played in the Biden administration.

If the plan goes as intended, the next few years will mostly involve quietly growing in a low salience environment while MAGA burns itself out. The goal is to stay on the sidelines and consolidate our strength so that in 2028 we can explode onto the scene and actually influence the world again.

I can’t predict what that will look like in terms of candidates or object-level policies, but I am certain it will broadly involve shedding the populism of Alt Right 1.0 and adopting an avowedly technocratic platform that can enable the GOP to win back suburban voters and actually govern. Right now there is a real desire for administrative competence, but nobody has been able to mobilize this impulse into an effective movement because of the Trump factor.

But what follows Trump? He hasn’t groomed an heir. The only people who had sufficient gravitas to hold MAGA together even half as well as Trump were Pence and DeSantis, and at this point both of them are outside the fold. Who else is left? Kari Lake? Vivek? J.D. Vance? Don Jr.? All of these guys are lightweights, and none of them can maintain the energy. After Trump leaves the scene there will be an enormous power vacuum on the Right.

And as with nature, politics abhors a vacuum. In 2028 we can rejoin the server.

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At this point the reader is probably frustrated at me for not doing a better job defining what I think the Alt Right 2.0 should actually stand for.

After all, I am currently most notable for an article playing up my departure from white nationalism. This makes it awkward to advocate some second iteration of a movement that was very openly WN the first time around.

Ultimately I think the Alt Right 2.0 must reject white nationalism because race is no longer the most salient friend-enemy distinction for the sort of people who call themselves Alt Right. Cancel culture is over and Hispanics are starting to vote GOP in large numbers, so it just doesn’t matter as much. As Hanania recently argued, most of America’s racial issues aren’t whites vs. nonwhites so much as blacks vs. everyone else.

We should still be “pro-white” in the sense of fervently resisting antiwhite racism, but we need to acknowledge that white people aren’t under attack like we used to be, and today the greatest threats to our freedom and prosperity come from blockheaded MAGA chuds who don’t believe in anything but their own resentment; affluent white suburban women who support vicious policies of censorship; selfish old people who won’t allow any reform to Social Security and Medicare; and isolationist heartlanders who want to abandon Ukraine and Taiwan to conquest by our enemies.

To my mind it makes a lot more sense to build our new ideology around administrative competence, intellectual rigor, and a disdain for obscurantism and grifting; free speech and a resistance to feminine communicative norms in politics; youthful vitalism and a push to dismantle gerontocracy; a cosmopolitan rejection of isolationism in favor of a Kissingerian / Jacksonian foreign policy of imperial self-interest; a civicminded determination to reform the American elite from within; and a new rightwing urbanism that seeks to break the mental association in America between conservatism and the automobile.

Those are my pet issues and how I want to see our platform develop at the moment, but it’s entirely possible that the landscape will change over the next few years, and I want to be very flexible on object level policies. To me metapolitics are far more important, and temperament a better basis for building coalitions than ideology.

I want to see people like me (broadly speaking, disagreeable and open people with big ideas and a respect for hierarchy and vitality) having influence and power more than I want to see success on any of the policies listed above. Becoming really identitarian about the exact tax rate or a specific trade policy seems stupid to me—these things are largely secondary to whether we are “on the same side” and can agree in principle.

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So that’s how I conceive the path ahead for Alt Right 2.0.

I am going to push forward with this vision and do my best to get people excited about the brand. Perhaps this will be an uphill battle because of the opprobrium generated in 2017, but I think this has mostly faded away. Younger Zoomers and Gen Alpha don’t even remember Charlottesville, and Jan 6 has largely eclipsed it in the public consciousness.

My hope is that with a good public relations strategy we can basically obtain the same position we had in late 2015. We will grow slowly and deliberately and have a lot of internecine debates to define who we are and what we believe. New leaders will emerge and a new consensus will develop in response to the needs of the day.

Then Trump will depart from politics and a new era of intellectual history can begin.

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I’m going to end this article with a bit of grifting.

To be frank, I want to dedicate my life to carrying out this vision. I think I can do it better than anyone else right now. I have a ton of energy and a high tolerance for conflict and mental stress, and am now a hoary middle aged man with enough life experience and maturity to lead a movement.

And when I say “lead” I don’t mean in the Richard Spencer sense. I’m too strange and autistic to put in front of normies—we’ll want someone like Daniella for that when the time comes. I intend to lead like Mike Enoch and Millennial Woes did in the days of the Proto Alt Right—by serving as a curator and amplifier of the best and most interesting new voices, and by helping to define what the movement means through constant and indefatigable brainstorming and debate.

I think I’m a good person to do this because a lot of people remember my name and associate it with the Alt Right brand, while I also stopped being relevant pretty much immediately before the Fun Times turned into the Bad Times. That means if anyone is capable of rehabilitating the term “Alt Right” it is probably me. It is my hope that the lower level of spiciness surrounding my name might allow me to platform and “mainstream” other figures from that era who should by all rights fall within the modern Overton Window but are sort of “grandfathered into canceling.”

My plan is basically to grow my substack with lots of articles and podcast appearances that set the tone for what I think Alt Right 2.0 should look like. I plan to consult a lot of leaders from back in the day to get their insight, and will also be amenable to wisdom from the oldhead commentariat. I am a flexible person and will iterate a lot and see what works best.

Eventually I want to start hiring people and form a kind of thinktank or advocacy group that can publish serious white papers for the Alt Right and support whatever frontline leader emerges in the next decade. But that is a more long term vision.

To do all this I need money. More importantly, I need time, and the freedom to doxx myself and show my face and quit my corporate bug job. If I didn’t have to keep rotating shapes for my bread I would probably be able to write 30-40 pages of content every day. I could very quickly have a huge impact on the landscape of modern right wing thought, and I am very confident that the vision laid out above could be achieved.

So with that I am asking you to give me some money.

A lot of people wanted to donate to me back in my song parody days, but I always turned them down because I was afraid of Disney’s lawyers. If you were one of those people, please consider donating now instead. If even 1% of my old fans became paid subscribers I would be able to pull this off easily.

I assure you the marginal impact of your investment will be enormous, far more so than any donation to Trump or a local GOP candidate. I have a proven track record of being able to influence public discourse—consider the fact that I came back out of nowhere and my article trashing the Midwest immediately went viral on Twitter.

That wasn’t on accident.

Give me a few shekels (ideally more than a few) and you’ll have a lot of fun watching what I can accomplish once the gloves come off.

Thank you for reading.