The Dissident Right And Its Discontents

Recovering the Faustian Spirit

Yesterday at dawn I awoke to a ping that said my Fuck Nebraska Essay had been cited by some chick named Jaimee Marshall—who with that name and physiognomy straight out of an SEC sorority rush I assumed was very definitely about to drop the frostiest campus conservative take of 2013.

Instead she dropped one of the more lucid metapolitical treatises I’ve read in all my years being racist on the internet, ballasting the canonical spergy / hyper-diachronic narration of Overton Window movement with a more textured account of the Vibe Shift’s operative mechanics in a womanly synchronic grammar of cultural criticism I’d hazard goes a long way toward not giving supervillain to normies and more vitally enables her to game out short-term changes in the cultural equilibria so as to answer that very salient eponymous query—to wit, The Right Won the Culture War. Now What?

The thrust of her piece is that a culturally hegemonic Right threatens overextension and thus the alienation of cognitively liberal heterodox creatives the modern GOP relies on for Meme Magic and youth vote penetration—a concern I myself grappled with in Conservatives Suck At Art amidst the halcyon days of early 2024.

Essentially the idea is that the Right was able to seize back cultural competence over the last decade because the Left just became aggressively anodyne and gay in this castrated safetyist tampon register completely out of step with what it looked like in Slick Willie’s day, causing a significant number of cognitively liberal nonconformists to ditch—by my reckoning in two waves, the first of which overlapped Gamergate and the Alt Right in 2014-2017 and the second Covid and woke hysteria in 2020-2022.

Jaimee narrates as follows:

That’s been the right’s biggest cultural victory. In defeating woke, we’ve been able to establish one of the central problems in modern art: an unwillingness to offend, to be truly transgressive—something the left was once known for, monopolizing edgy music, transgressive art, biting satire. An inversion occurred in the 2010s, paradoxically positioning right-wingers as more artistically inclined in many ways. Historically, conservatives were, go figure, temperamentally conservative: low in openness, highly conscientious. High openness to experience has long correlated with liberal politics and creativity. To be low in openness is a disposition that could be characterized as instinctually anti-art.

But something shifted. A cohort of temperamentally liberal, creatively inclined people became disenchanted with mainstream liberal politics and migrated rightward… The result is a new sociopolitical type… creatively liberal in temperament, yet aligned with conservative or even hyper-conservative politics.

…and just look who the lass foregrounds as mythic archetype!

Sometimes this contradiction is so great, it’s de-radicalizing. Such was the case with this white nationalist, having uprooted his life to live out his philosophical ideals, only to become disillusioned with his utopian vision of a white ethnostate filed with likeminded people sharing the same values. It’s here he discovered he had more in common with New York liberals—even brown and black ones—than with the incurious, dogmatic, religious simpletons in this new community... They weren’t brave philosophers, conquerors, or innovators. They were conformists, content with their simple lives. They arrived at the same conclusions, but through diametrically opposed processes.

Wally B’s story is lowkey metastasizing into Legend—how cool is that?!

Anywho, this is where she lands it:

The right’s cultural victory could contain the seed of its own undoing: cultural domination that forces the opposition to adapt and, by falling into the same purity-spiraling hysterics that once consumed the left, allows a newly reformed left to position itself as the reasonable alternative. The right should fear the left of tomorrow being better than the left of yesterday and possibly, better than the right of today.

That risks bleeding a lot of followers who migrated rightward precisely because there was no space on the left to oppose critical race theory or intersectional feminism, but who aren’t married to any particular vision of traditionalism or religious orthodoxy or even strictly socially conservative. That matters because the camps I’m talking about are the creatively inclined, contrarian-minded, cognitively fluid types who hold virtually all the cultural capital.

And this narrative, I think, has quite a lot of truth to it when appropriately pruned.

That said a lot of fellers in the Dissident Right will dismiss it as bad faith womanny concern trolling and won’t parse the comments on creativity as commensurate with their own lived experience, so I think it may be helpful for us to draw some firm lines.

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As mentioned above, there were two waves of anti-Leftist heterodoxy last decade:

• First Gamergate in 2014, which in 2015 merged chaotically with the Manosphere and right-libertarian elements on 4chan still bitter over Ron Paul’s treatment by Jews Neo-Cons during the 2012 GOP primary as well as the disparate remnants of New Atheism to form the Alt Right—an overwhelmingly Millennial movement with mostly Gen X and Xennial leadership that started out and mostly stayed pluralistic / mission-focused around Trump (and then the long-term goal of a white ethnostate). In 2015 thru early 2016 it received a lot of favorable coverage in the mainstream press due to its members being mostly educated and attractive from liberal families (including many dozens of classy young ladies, often joining due to fear e.g. of Muslims after the Cologne attacks or ambient black violence following Ferguson) and Spencer being a highly effective spokesman, but then after Trump locked down the nomination began to swell with kind of retarded elements frankly who took oven memes seriously and began egging on purity spirals and daffy tactics a la Retard Rallies. And so it got eviscerated after Cville, probs dying the day Matt Heimbach fucked his mom-in-law in 2018—which was also when the rank-and-file started to go underground or back to lurking as major deplatforming surges kicked off the Long March Years. The Millennial Alt Right was not built for this new regime, and so as a rule either ended up going Post-Left or Tradcath or focused on they unc career as a far and away more slippery cohort in Zoomers led by Nick Fuentes became the operative face of White Identity.

• The Dissident Right as we know it started out as what remained of the Alt Right after Charlottesville without going underground or back to civilian life—and then absolutely exploded during Covid Lockdowns and the Summer of Floyd. It’s a lot more of a loose and inchoate ecosystem than the Alt Right ever was, lacking any hard or definite goal besides generally unfurling the Boomer Truth Regime and arresting various diseases of late modernity and liberal democracy. What remains of the Alt Right (often Elder Millennials who couldn’t pivot out during the rough years or chose not to) tend to come across as scarred and dour, and a lot of them got absorbed into the Tradcaths (the largest faction, of whom Fuentes and his Groypers are a half-ironic / more overtly racialist but also lowkey niggery Zoomer wing). Then the other big faction would be the BAPists—-think gay bodybuilder vitalism adjacent to Dimes Square / Post Left coolpeepo in the Big Apple… which technically first evolved out of frogtwitter which itself was a more ironic part or fellow traveler of the Alt Right led by my old fren Menaquinone4 who I think disappeared? Anyway BAPism is probably the closest part of the DR in spirit to the old Alt Right because of its fun-loving energy but also a lot less “theater kid” and exuberant hence it surviving during the Long March Years.

Then after the Vibe Shift and growth of Substack as a platform you get what I would call the Post Alt Right—which is overtly elitist / HBD-aware with Straussian leanings, overtly non-Christian, and (post-)ironically flirts with Left-adjacent aesthetics and impulses for rhetorical leverage / shits and giggles, at first consisting specifically of:

• Richard Hanania, who’s far and away the most important at first—though I’d say he and his sphere stops being Post Alt Right and a lot more of a regular neoliberal somewhere in late 2024 or early 2025.

• Richard Spencer himself, second most importantly but kind of incidentally as he’s mostly just doing his own thing at this point as a wine track white nationalist gentleman’s club / mystery cult, or the “imperial remnant” as Fuentes called it

• Wally B (that’s me!), probs third most significantly overall (for sure in mid-2024) but also the only dude here intentionally and not incidentally—because note that in early-to-mid 2024 I’m regularly collaborating with both of the Richards such that my sphere becomes kind of a bridge between the two of them while Dave Greene (most important DR qua DR on Substack I’d reckon) is kind of exhaustedly sighing at all three of us in the same breath at that point.

Then in June of 2024 I found Tortuga—which Spencer apparently finds a little chintzy and lowkey freezes me out over (though I think he also kind of just found me annoying at that point, which fair) and I likewise start to drift away from Hanania’s network as he grows ever more neoliberal beige Straussian chungus and I ever more 2016-coded and secure in my own independent power base.

…particularly after befriending Theon Ultima and realizing the dude basically agrees with me on everything and is kind of coo pretending Charlottesville never happened and being Mike and Sven But Pirates + we’ll let in our nice Indian / Jew friends since at this point our racism is if we’re honest kind of only about saying Nigger.

And ever since then the Post Alt Right has for all intents and purposes been a matter of how aligned one is with the mission and objectives of the Tortuga Society.

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Now, you’re probably rubbing your brow going
“Walt! This doesn’t help at all!”

The thing to understand is neither the Dissident Right nor Post Alt Right are propositionally coherent movements in the same way the Alt Right sort of was.

They’re vibes.

…which isn’t to say individual members aren’t coherent—I’m certain Dave Greene’s worldview is a veritable cathedral of syllogistic integrity compared to mine own—but someone like Fuentes for instance is transparently pure affect, and the kid’s followers even worse, aligning with both elders and peers of an opposite Nazbol/Third Worldist disposition not because of “ideas” but on account of simple affective compatibility.

…as does the Post Alt Right / Tortuga, by the way—which at this point has to be at least a third or so Catholic, but also very specifically the chill / fun kind.

,So what are the differences in vibe?

• DR games around catastrophe—PAR games around stable equilibria

• DR condemns—PAR models incentive gradients

• DR does White Taqiyya—PAR embraces candor

• DR disdains childish things—PAR plays exuberantly

• DR forswears all performance—PAR tells you it’s performing

• DR is artistically didactic—PAR takes his art wherever it takes him

• DR is always “exhausted”—PAR eager for action

• DR is cautious—PAR experimental

• DR backward-looking—PAR forever moving onward

• DR is all about imposing a No—PAR about extracting a Yes

• DR moralizes—PAR strategizes

Anyway all that prolly reads to some of you fags as though I’m sneering at the DR here.

Not so.

They adopt that register for a reason—as do you, and I, and everyone on occasion, and at times for far longer than is altogether reasonable but nobody will ever call us out on sine there’s not always a predictable linear path out of the mire when Roberta Kaplan shreds your life like that.

Because sometimes you’re just a nigger picking cotton while massa rapes your wife, and in a situation like that a lot of times even the overseer won’t push the issue if you’re a little languid on the uptake.

…whereas if you’re still pickin slow when we free now nigga and they pay us by the bushel nigga so is you ever gonna wake the fuck up lazy nigga?!

You still won’t want to—feels the same.

Doesn’t make you any less gay for not doing it.

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So one thing about Millennial dudes is we’re all kind of enormous faggoty simps deep down on account of having been socialized to see women as girl power action heroes who never do anything wrong ever and with whom we can also reliably form an epistemically and phenomenologically symmetrical dyad.

It goes without saying this had a lot of failure modes.

That said…

A lot of the relationships that came out of the Alt Right genuinely came close to that.

Because the thing about Millennial chicks is that when they experience themselves as aligned with you in a moral register attached to an artistic / intellectual flow state their hypergamous instincts really do just seem to turn off to whatever extent is even possible in a woman and turn her at least temporarily into your bestie-cum-boymom, such that for a while you kind of just can let your guard down.

You don’t really get that kind of limerence in Zoomettes—always need to engage them sexually because the moment bae’s not juicy she’s spicy… which I suppose to be fair is still a lot better than the modal Millennial chick’s yellow rocking on a coffee date

Thing is though with Millennial girls to unlock aligned register you ultimately have to lead them morally or aesthetically in a way that lands as Real (probably kind of similar to what Boomer women experienced amidst the Summer of Love)—which luckily for me both Natalie and Diana found the Alt Right through my memes and in doing so locked themselves into over half a decade each of intense dyadic binding, which even now are probs still tied for the most substantive romance of my life.

Note precisely none of this would have been possible without that cringe Millennial earnestness that made Natalie and Diana genuinely experience men of the Alt Right as Heroes for taking to the streets to Protect Them from wily Syrian #Rapefugees—a remarkably toothy expression of asymmetry for girls of their cohort that I suspect was activated specifically because it involved a hostile male outgroup trying to poop their genes given at least on our end that’s what had us drive Roosh V out of the movement the very instant he started with some conquering your women bit.

For at least a few months there was real solidarity between the sexes there—race gave us a common grammar in the same way Occupy gave liberals via class.

…until of course some wignat ruined it with the White Sharia meme just around the time the Alt Right was starting to become declassee and the girls get cold feet—whole thing became a sausagefest after that, and seems to have by and large stayed that way, there being now large swathes of tidder grifters and trad moms in the scene but vanishingly few eligible bachelorettes from good families compared to 2016..

Which part of that is just because the Dissident Right is quite a lot lower status both socioeconomically and in terms of cultural capital than the Alt Right at its inception, Nick Fuentes having far and away less gravitas than Richard Spencer for instance and blisteringly less legibility as a sex symbol unless Zoomettes get a lot more wet than I realize for guys who talk like Chicago newscasters.

The other component is not being sexist in the right way.

Cause what niggas don’t realize is that there’s basically always 100x more women who want to submit than fellers capable of leadership—which isn’t something just anyone can do btw or else the world would look a lot more equal than it is—and basically any woman will submit to you given the right gravitas and differential in status / resources.

The problem is Zoomer male sexual gravitas tends to derive pretty much exclusively through fuckboy affect and withdrawal / waste her time logic—which on the one hand is game theoretically ideal for signaling value, but isn’t really a positive compulsive force that dominates chicks in bounded diachronic adult ways so much as keep her in Tinkerbelle mode forever—whereas Zoomer traditionalism meanwhile will a lot of times lack that baseline fondness for chicks or tendency to see her as childlike that’s kind of necessary in any relationship frankly but especially a toothy trad one since in practice almost nothing terrifies a girl more than being subject to a dude she has zero affective leverage over hence them freaking out when you don’t care if they cry.

And I get it, fellers—in the world y’all grow up in it’s a cottonfield situation at best.

The problem is these things become a feedback loop. When the chicks start to leave so do a lot of the younger guys capable of leadership—hell, the very reason I wasn’t at Charlottesville was so I could hang out with Nat instead that weekend who’d been over the Alt Right for months by that point—and then it’s just a race to the bottom.

And as pestiferous as bitches be, you can bet you’ll be missing their faggoty little shit tests a whole lot when the only ones left are you and momfucking Matt Heimbach.

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The Left is still worse—obviously.

Structurally hostile to asymmetry, disgust for provisioning, faggoty age gap discourse…

So long as the Barstooler impulse Blumpf represents in however unpropositionalized and inchoate a form remains dominant over Trads in the GOP it makes sense for the Post Alt Right to stay broadly aligned with the Right.

If the Dems retvrned to Bill Clinton / Marilyn Manson values while the GOP sends Barbara Bush and Rick Santorum to wag a finger at me? Then I’d switch my vote.

I don’t see that happening anytime soon, frankly.

From my vantage point Trad hysteria reads as incel rage basically always and thus never a real threat, whereas some broc-head calling me a Faggot Theater Kid might hurt my feelings but sure as shit won’t send me voting for Klobuchar anytime soon. Women will be more sensitive to these things of course and tend to overestimate the civilizational threat from low status males, but I myself tend to think even any chick who’d be swayed over that would break sooner over something similar or adjacent.

I likewise tend to think that so long as more and more affluent suburban women shift into the Democrat Party the more scoldy it will become over time, whereas the migration of brown boys into the GOP will produce the opposite effect.

That said what we COULD see is an implicit racial dynamic where white Millennial men from the settled professional classes flee the GOP in droves out of solidarity with their wives against Tatemaxxed subaltern Zoomer boys (see Playing Both Sides).

And so basically the takeaway is this:

• Dissident Right artists and intellectuals will basically never be pulled Left… in a lot of the older unc guys because they stuck around after Cville during the cotton picking rapeyears and can’t imagine a world that isn’t hell and in Low Zoomer men because they’re under such a lopsided epistemic regime that lots of them lowkey just hate women or at least adopt a nihilistic attitude toward negotiation.

• Post Alt Right artists and intellectuals could be… but it needs to be pull and not push because most trad grievance is processed ultimately by them as harmless noise and at worst something to stay home for on election day while feminist grievance feels like deep semiotic castration. Meanwhile they won’t react to a loud and powerful right wing culture that’s still Barstooler by voting Left so much as kind of rolling their eyes and calling it gauche.

That said Gavin could probs flip us with the right bit of clever messaging.

Anyone else is dead in the water.

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So… I like to consider myself something of a custodian of the Alt Right’s memory.

One reason for this is that of all the big names from that era I disappeared literally the instant things started to go wrong… which wasn’t even good timing on my part if I’m honest so much as a function of getting shoah’d literally the exact same day Trump attacked Syria, which made the whole fucking movement collectively poop its pants such that most people didn’t even notice I was gone for a couple days.

But that’s just another reason people tend to associate me exclusively with the good times—the memes, camaraderie, lasting friendships and relationships that came out of those years… it really was exactly like being at Woodstock or something, and I quite frankly REFUSE to let anyone flatten those years of my life like Heather Heyer

Yeah I’ll fucking joke about her.

Eat my cum.

I wasn’t even at that stupid fucking rally.

And the Alt Right was my movement too—
same as Ryan Faulk and Ramzpaul and Jared Taylor and everyone else who didn’t go.

Tens of thousands of guys came in through my propaganda—which if you ackshually watch you’ll notice is never even the least bit violent or hateful and overwhelmingly about e.g. not having fear and taking your own damn side and standing up for yourself by never punching right or ceding moral authority to bad faith moral gatekeepers who extract power from unadjudicated jurisdictional writ.

….every single bit of which by the way still means everything to me in retrospect—even if I’m not at all a White Nationalist these days and lowkey sort of despise most wypipo if I’m speaking entirely honestly famalam.

Because if someone ever again tries to tell me I CAN’T be a White Nationalist—attempts to epistemically foreclose me, or manipulate me out of taking my own side in bad faith, however that happens to pan out in practice—then at least in that one particular moment you can bet your sweet ass I’m going Full 14/88 again.

If the Alt Right’s memory means anything it’s that I’ll NEVER allow another man to make me feel a lick of shame or hesitation in standing up for myself and my interests, whether that’s about who I am or where I come from or what I stand for or what I want out of life or anything else, and the moment anyone in my life tries to do so they’re frankly a maggot to me—and that’s the Friend-Enemy Distinction, hoss.

More broadly than that it’s about Tribe—which is contextual and floating and race pretty clearly plays a role in, but only in a low resolution way usually, such that for your average white person better than Apoc it won’t ever prove especially salient except I guess in prison or perhaps an African airport given that if you aren’t a huge fucking wiener basically all your meaningful rivals in life will be other white men.

Anywho in Late Modernity neurotype pretty clearly matters more than race which is for sure a load bearing variable but not nearly so much so as to lend itself to purism—which means that at the end of the day I consider Theon Ultima and Rajeev Ram and sunshine moonlight and Marcus Benedicta and Ancient Problemz all part of my männerbund in equal measure.

And racism is of course still very important—just primarily as a means of keeping away the sort of fags who won’t let you be racist, and moreover to make more winsome by way of slurs irrumatio with your qt Jewess / Castiza gee eff.

Yes I’m hypocritical—because I’m Sovereign.

Go read your fucking Schmitt.

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